Sufferings and Survival : A Study of Maya Angelou’s Autobiographies

A dissertation submitted to Bharathidasan University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the award of the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy in English

Submitted by

K. SORNAMBIGA (Reg. No. 4254/Ph.D.K-5/English/FT/October 2012)

Under the Guidance of Dr. K. PREM KUMAR Assistant Professor

Post-Graduate & Research Department of English BISHOP HEBER COLLEGE (Autonomous) (Nationally Reaccredited at the A+ Level by NAAC) Recognized by UGC as ‘College with Potential for Excellence’ TIRUCHIRAPPALLI – 620 017.

October 2014 Dr. K. Prem Kumar M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D., Assistant Professor Department of English BISHOP HEBER COLLEGE (Autonomous) (Nationally Reaccredited at the A+ Level by NAAC) Recognized by UGC as ‘College with Potential for Excellence’ TIRUCHIRAPPALLI – 620 017.

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This is to certify that the dissertation entitled Sufferings and Survival : A

Study of Maya Angelou’s Autobiographies submitted by SORNAMBIGA K (Ref.

No. 4254/Ph.D.-k5/ English/FT/October 2012) to the Bharathidasan University,

Tiruchirappalli in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the award of the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy in English is her original work, based on the investigation carried out independently by her during the period of study under my guidance and supervision.

Signature of the Research Supervisor

Declaration

I, the Research Scholar hereby declare that the dissertation entitled Sufferings and Survival : A Study of Maya Angelou’s Autobiographies is a record of first hand research work done by me during my course period 2012-2014 under the guidance of Dr. K. Prem Kumar, M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D., Assistant Professor,

Department of English, Bishop Heber College (Autonomous), Tiruchirappalli – 620

017 and it has not formed the basis for any degree, diploma, associateship, fellowship or any other similar title.

Tiruchirappalli

Date : K. SORNAMBIGA

Acknowledgement

I would like to express a deep sense of gratitude to my guide and convenor, Dr. K. PremKumar, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Bishop Heber College, Trichy, for his able guidance and parental concern. My thanks are due to him for the continuous support of my PhD study and research, for his patience, motivation, enthusiasm and immense knowledge.

Besides my guide, I would like to thank the rest of my thesis committee: Dr. Suresh Frederick, Associate and Head, Department of English, Bishop Heber College, Trichy and Dr. Cheryl Davis, Assistant Professor, St. Joseph College, Trichy, for their encouragement, insightful comments and hard questions.

I wish to place on record my gratitude to Dr. D. Paul Dhayabaran, Principal, Bishop Heber College for permitting me to do research in the institution.

My sincere thanks also go to Mr. A. Varam Viji, Superintendent (SF), Bishop Heber College for he.lping me to do Ph.D in this prestigious institution. I sincerely thank Mr. R. Raja who has executed the job for word processing with professional touch.

I would like to thank my mom K. Shanthy and dad P. Kasiviswanathan because of whom I am what I am today. I’d like to thank other family members for their kind words and deeds. I thank everyone who helped me complete my thesis in one way or other.

I extend my gratitude to my husband S. Kanakasabapathi for his moral and emotional support. Last but not the least I thank my sweet little kid ‘Keshav’ for having made me forget the exhaustion that comes with any research work through his playfulness and love.

Above all, I thank ‘existence’ for having blessed me with this life and a sensitive mind.

K. SORNAMBIGA. Contents

Chapter Title Page No.

Certificate

Declaration

Acknowledgement

I Introduction 1

II A Study of Black American Writings and Maya 19 Angelou’s Autobiographies

III Sufferings and Survival: A Study of Maya Angelou’s 74 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Gather Together in My Name and Singin’ and Swingin’ and Getting’ Merry Like Christmas

IV Sufferings and Survival: A Study of Maya Angelou’s 132 The Heart of a Woman and All God’s Children need Traveling Shoes

V Conclusion 178

Works Cited 197

Introduction

Literature is a term that does not have a universally accepted definition, but which has variably included all written work; writing that possesses literary merit; and language that foregrounds literariness, as opposed to ordinary language. Etymologically the term literature is derived from the Latin word “literature or literatura, which means

"writing formed with letters", although some definitions include spoken or sung texts.

Literature can be classified into fiction, non-fiction, poetry, prose, short story and drama. The works are often categorised according to historical periods, or according to their adherence to certain aesthetic features or expectations.

Literature may consist of texts based on factual information, journalistic or non- fiction, a category that may also include polemical works, biographies, and reflective essays, or it may consist of texts based on imagination such as fiction, poetry, or drama.

Literature written in poetry emphasizes the aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language such as sound, symbolism, and metre, to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, ordinary meanings. The works written in prose applies to ordinary grammatical structure and the natural flow of speech. Literature can also be classified according to historical periods, genres, and political influences. While the concept of genre has broadened over the centuries, in general, a genre consists of artistic works that fall within a certain central theme; examples of genre include romance, mystery, crime, fantasy, erotica and adventure, among others.

The reading of good literature can bring a human more closely in contact with the real world than he could ever have been brought without a degree of personal experience for which the span of most lives is insufficient. And because of this literature, far from making a man anti-social can equip him to lead his life among his 2 fellows with an adequacy, satisfaction and understanding he would not otherwise have known. Thus literature enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires, and in this respect it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become. According to

William J. Long, “Behind every book is a man; behind the man is the race; and behind the race are the natural and social environment whose influence is unconsciously reflected” (2).

Literature finds its place in the studies of youth and the affections of men and women by virtue of the fact that it is one of the fine arts. All art forms are any expression of life in forms of truth and beauty. They are the reflections of some truth and beauties which are in the world, but which remain unnoticed until brought out to the human beings’ attention by some sensitive human soul. In the broadest sense, perhaps, literature means simply the written records of the race, including all its history and sciences. Mayhead Robin in his Understanding Literature states that “Literature can take us out of the track of weary routine, by leading us to understand something of that whole vast body of human living in which our day-to-day concerns have their place” (9).

American literature is the body of written works produced in the English language in the United States. Like other national literatures, American literature was shaped by the history of the country that produced it. For almost a century and a half,

America was merely a group of colonies scattered along the eastern seaboard of the

North American continent—colonies from which a few hardy souls tentatively ventured westward. After a successful rebellion against the motherland, America became the United States, a nation.

By the end of the 19th century, this nation extended southward to the Gulf of

Mexico, northward to the 49th parallel, and westward to the Pacific. By the end of the 3

19th century, too, it had taken its place among the powers of the world—its fortunes so interrelated with those of other nations that inevitably it became involved in two world wars and, following these conflicts, with the problems of Europe and East Asia.

Meanwhile, the rise of science and industry, as well as changes in ways of thinking and feeling, wrought many modifications in people’s lives. All these factors in the development of the United States moulded the literature of the country.

American literature at first was naturally a colonial literature, by authors who were Englishmen and who thought and wrote as such. These volumes often glorified their author, they were avowedly written to explain colonizing opportunities to

Englishmen. In time, each colony was similarly described. Only some works were written praising America as a land of economic promise. Writers acknowledged British allegiance, but others stressed the differences of opinion that spurred the colonists to leave their homeland. More important, they argued questions of government involving the relationship between church and state. The utilitarian writings of the 17th century included biographies, treatises, accounts of voyages, and sermons. There were few achievements in drama or fiction, since there was a widespread prejudice against these forms.

The wrench of the American Revolution emphasized differences that had been growing between American and British political concepts. As the colonists moved to the belief that rebellion was inevitable, fought the bitter war, and worked to found the new nation’s government, they were influenced by a number of very effective political writers. Some magazines and pamphlets spurred Americans to fight on through the blackest years of the war. Based upon Paine’s simple deistic beliefs, they showed the conflict as a stirring melodrama with the angelic colonists against the forces of evil.

Such white and black picturing’s were highly effective propaganda. Another reason for 4

Paine’s success was his poetic fervour, which found expression in impassioned words and phrases long to be remembered and quoted. More distinguished for insight into problems of government and cool logic than for eloquence, these works became a classic statement of American governmental and more generally of republican theory.

At the time they were highly effective in influencing legislators who voted on the new constitution.

In the beginning, poetry became a weapon during the American Revolution, with both loyalists and continentals urging their forces on, stating their arguments, and celebrating their heroes in verse and songs such as “Yankee Doodle” and “ Nathan

Hale,” and “The Epilogue,” mostly set to popular British melodies and in manner resembling other British poems of the period. The most memorable American poet of the period was Philip Freneau, whose first well-known poems, Revolutionary War satires, served as effective propaganda; later he turned to various aspects of the

American scene. Although he wrote much in the stilted manner of the Neoclassicists, such poems as “The Indian Burying Ground,” “The Wild Honey Suckle,” “To a Caty- did,” and “On a Honey Bee” were romantic lyrics of real grace and feeling that were forerunners of a literary movement destined to be important in the 19th century.

In the years toward the close of the 18th century, both dramas and novels of some historical importance were produced. Though theatrical groups had long been active in America, the first American comedy presented professionally was Royall

Tyler’s Contrast (1787). This drama was full of echoes of Goldsmith and Sheridan, but it contained a Yankee character, who brought something native to the stage. William

Hill Brown wrote the first American novel, The Power of Sympathy (1789), which showed authors how to overcome ancient prejudices against this form by following the sentimental novel form invented by Samuel Richardson. A flood of sentimental novels, 5 amusing satires on democracy, Gothic thrillers etc, followed to the end of the 19th century.

Important movements in drama, poetry, fiction, and criticism took shape in the years before, during, and after World War I. The eventful period that followed the war left its imprint upon books of all kinds. Literary forms of the period were extraordinarily varied, and in drama, poetry, and fiction the leading authors tended toward radical technical experiments. Although drama had not been a major art form in the 19th century, no type of writing was more experimental than a new drama that arose in rebellion against the glib commercial stage.

In the early years of the 20th century, Americans traveling in Europe encountered a vital, flourishing theatre; returning home, some of them became active in founding the Little Theatre movement throughout the country. Freed from commercial limitations, playwrights experimented with dramatic forms and methods of production, and in time producers, actors, and dramatists appeared who had been trained in college classrooms and community playhouses. Some Little Theatre groups became commercial producers—for example, the Washington Square Players, founded in 1915, which became the Theatre Guild (first production in 1919). The resulting drama was marked by a spirit of innovation and by a new seriousness and maturity. Some of the important American writers were Samuel Adams, John Dickinson, Thomas Paine,

Emily Dickinson, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Frost, Eugene O’ Neill, Edgar Allan Poe etc., whose works reflected the life of the United States.

This research is a study of Maya Angelou’s autobiography. An acclaimed

American poet and autobiographer, Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Johnson in St.

Louis, Missouri. Angelou has had a varied career as a singer, dancer, actress, composer, and Hollywood's first female black director, but is most famous as a writer, editor, 6 essayist, playwright, and poet. As a civil rights activist, Angelou worked for Dr. Martin

Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. She has also been an educator and is currently the

Reynolds professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University.

Angelou had become recognized not only as a spokesperson for blacks and women, but also for all people who are committed to raising the moral standards of living in the United States. She has served on two presidential committees, for Gerald

Ford in 1975 and for Jimmy Carter in 1977. In 2000, Angelou was awarded the

National Medal of Arts by President Bill Clinton. In 2010, she was awarded the

Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour in the U.S., by President

Barack Obama. Angelou has been awarded over 50 honorary degrees. Angelou’s most famous work, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), deals with her early years in

Long Beach, St. Louis and Stamps, Arkansas, where she lived with her brother and paternal grandmother. In one of its most evocative (and controversial) moments,

Angelou describes how she was first cuddled then raped by her mother's boyfriend when she was just seven years old. When the man was murdered by her uncle for his crime, Angelou felt responsible, and stopped talking. Angelou remained mute for five years, but developed a love for language. She read black authors like Langston Hughes,

W. E. B. Du Bois, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar, as well as canonical works by William

Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and Edgar Allan Poe.

When Angelou was twelve and a half, Mrs. Flowers, an educated black woman, finally got her to speak again. Mrs. Flowers, as Angelou recalled in her children’s book

Mrs. Flowers: A Moment of Friendship (1986), emphasized the importance of the spoken word, explained the nature of and importance of education, and instilled in her a love of poetry. Angelou graduated at the top of her eighth-grade class. Angelou attended George Washington High School in San Francisco and took lessons in dance 7 and drama on a scholarship at the California Labour School. When Angelou was just seventeen, she graduated from high school and gave birth to a son, Guy.

She began to work as the first female and black street car conductor in San

Francisco. She also worked as a shake dancer in night clubs, fry cook in hamburger joints, dinner cook in a Creole restaurant and once had a job in a mechanic's shop, taking the paint off cars with her hands. Angelou married a white ex-sailor, Tosh

Angelos, in 1950. After they separated, Angelou continued her study of dance in New

York City, returning to San Francisco to sing in the Purple Onion cabaret and garnering the attention of talent scouts. From 1954 to 1955, she was a member of the cast of a touring production of Porgy and Bess. During the late 1950s, Angelou sang in West

Coast and Hawaiian nightclubs, before returning to New York to continue her stage career.

Angelou joined the Harlem Writers Guild in the late 1950s and met James

Baldwin and other important writers. It was during this time that Angelou had the opportunity to hear Dr. Martin Luther King speech. Inspired by his message, she decided to become a part of the struggle for civil rights. She was offered a position as the northern coordinator for Dr. King's SCLC. Following her work for Dr. King,

Angelou moved to Cairo with her son, and, in 1962, to Ghana in West Africa. She worked as a freelance writer and was a feature editor at the African Review. When

Angelou returned to the United States in the mid-1960s, she was encouraged by author

James Baldwin and Robert Loomis, an editor at Random House, to write an autobiography. Initially, Angelou declined the offers, but eventually changed her mind and wrote I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The book chronicles Angelou's childhood and ends with the birth of her son. It won immediate success and was nominated for a

National Book Award. 8

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the first of Angelou’s six autobiographies. It is widely taught in schools, though it has faced controversy over its portrayal of race, sexual abuse and violence. Angelou’s use of fiction-writing techniques like dialogue and plot in her autobiographies was innovative for its time and helped, in part, to complicate the genre’s relationship with truth and memory. Though her books are episodic and tightly-crafted, the events seldom follow a strict chronology and are arranged to emphasize themes. Most critics have judged Angelou’s subsequent autobiographies in light of her first, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings remains the most highly praised. Other volumes include Gather Together in My Name (1974), which begins when Angelou is seventeen and a new mother; Singin' and Swingin' and

Gettin' Merry like Christmas, an account of her tour in Europe and Africa with Porgy and Bess; The Heart of a Woman (1981), a description of Angelou’s acting and writing career in New York and her work for the civil rights movement; and All God's Children

Need Traveling Shoes (1986), which recounts Angelou's travels in West Africa and her decision to return, without her son, to America.

It took Angelou fifteen years to write the final volume of her autobiography, A

Song Flung up to Heaven (2002). The book covers four years, from the time Angelou returned from Ghana in 1964 through the moment when she sat down at her mother's table and began to write I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in 1968. A Song Flung up to

Heaven deals forthrightly with these events, and the poignant beauty of Angelou's writing enhances rather than masks the candour with which she addresses the racial crisis through which America was passing.

Angelou is also a prolific and widely-read poet, though her poetry has often been lauded more for its content—praising black beauty, the strength of women, and the human spirit; criticizing the Vietnam War; demanding social justice for all—than 9 for its poetic virtue. Yet Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie, which was published in 1971, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1972. This volume contains thirty-eight poems, some of which were published in The Poetry of Maya Angelou

(1969). In other poems, Angelou turns her attention to the lives of black people in

America from the time of slavery to the rebellious 1960s. Her themes deal broadly with the painful anguish suffered by blacks forced into submission, with guilt over accepting too much, and with protest and basic survival.

As Angelou wrote her autobiographies and poems, she continued her career in film and television. She was the first black woman to have a screenplay Georgia,

Georgia produced in 1972. She was honoured with a nomination for an Emmy award for her performance in Roots in 1977. In 1979, Angelou helped adapt her book, I Know

Why the Caged Bird Sings, for a television movie of the same name. Angelou wrote the poetry for the 1993 film Poetic Justice and played the role of Aunt June. She also played Lelia Mae in the 1993 television film There Are No Children Here and appeared as Anna in the feature film How to Make an American Quilt in 1995.

One source of Angelou's fame in the early 1990s was President Bill Clinton's invitation to write and read the first inaugural poem in decades. Americans all across the country watched as she read "On the Pulse of Morning," which begins "A Rock, a

River, a Tree" and calls for peace, racial and religious harmony, and social justice for people of different origins, incomes, genders, and sexual orientations. It recalls the civil rights movement and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s famous "I have a dream" speech as it urges America to "Give birth again to the Dream" of equality. Angelou challenged the new administration and all Americans to work together for progress.

During the early 1990s, Angelou wrote several books for children, including

Life Doesn't Frighten Me (1993), which also featured the work of Jean-Michel 10

Basquiat; My Painted House, My Friendly Chicken, and Me (1994), and Kofi and His

Magic (1996), both collaborations with the photographer Margaret Courtney-Clark.

Angelou’s poetry collections include The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou

(1994) and Phenomenal Woman (1995), a collection of four poems that takes its title from a poem which originally appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1978. The poem’s narrator describes the physical and spiritual characteristics and qualities that make her attractive. Angelou has also written occasional poems, including A Brave

Startling Truth (1995), which commemorated the founding of the United Nations, and

Amazing Peace (2005), a poem written for the White House Christmas tree-lighting ceremony.

Angelou has published multiple collections of essays. Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now (1993) contain declarations, complaints, memories, opinions, and advice on subjects ranging from faith to jealousy. Genevieve Stanford, writing in

Publishers Weekly, described the essays as quietly inspirational pieces. Anne

Whitehouse of the New York Times Book Review observed that the book would appeal to readers in search of clear messages with easily digested meanings. Even the Stars

Look Lonesome (1997) is the sister volume, a book of candid and lovingly crafted homeless to sensuality, beauty, and black women.

Indeed, Angelou’s poetry can also be traced to African-American oral traditions like slave and work songs, especially in her use of personal narrative and emphasis on individual responses to hardship, oppression and loss. In addition to examining individual experience, Angelou’s poems often respond to matters like race and sex on a larger social and psychological scale. She followed a tradition established by Frederick Douglass—the slave narrative—speaking in the first-person singular talking about the first-person plural, always saying I meaning 'we.' Trying to work with 11 that form, the autobiographical mode, to change it, to make it bigger, richer, finer, and more inclusive in the twentieth century has been a great challenge for her.In 2013 she was the recipient of the Literarian Award, an honorary National Book Award for contributions to the literary community.

Some of her important works are

Autobiography

 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 1970.

 Gather Together in My Name, 1974.

 Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry like Christmas, 1976.

 The Heart of a Woman, 1981.

 All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes.

 A Song Flung up to Heaven, 2002.

 Mom & Me & Mom, 2013.

Poetry

 Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie, 1971.

 Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well,1975.

 And Still I Rise,, 1978.

 Shaker, Why Don't You Sing, 1983.

 Poems, four volumes, Bantam, 1986.

 Now Sheba Sings the Song (illustrated poem), 1987.

 I Shall Not Be Moved, 1990.

 On the Pulse of Morning, 1993.

 A Brave and Startling Truth, Random House (New York, NY), 1995.

 Phenomenal Woman: Four Poems Celebrating Women,1995.

 Amazing Peace, 2005. 12

Essays

 Lessons in Living, 1993.

 Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now,1993.

 Even the Stars Look Lonesome,1997.

 Hallelujah! The Welcome Table, 2004.

 Mother: A Cradle to Hold Me, 2006.

 Letter to my Daughter, 2008.

She also wrote Children’s Books, Plays, Film and Television Scripts and song recordings.

This research entitled Sufferings and Survival: A Study of Maya Angelou's autobiographies analyses the life of Maya Angelou from her birth to her sufferings as a

Black woman in America. Maya Angelou is famous for her autobiographies which reflect the true reality of one’s personal life.

An autobiography is taken from the Greek word autos which is a written account of the life of a person written by that person. The word 'autobiography' was first used deprecatingly by William Taylor in 1797 in the English periodical, the

Monthly Review, when he suggested the word as a hybrid but condemned it as

'pedantic'; but its next recorded use was in its present sense by Robert Southey in 1809.

The form of autobiography however goes back to antiquity. Biographers generally rely on a wide variety of documents and viewpoints; an autobiography, however, may be based entirely on the writer's memory. Closely associated with autobiography is the form of memoir.

In antiquity such works were typically entitled apologia, purporting to be self- justification rather than self-documentation. Augustine (354–430) applied the title

Confessions to his autobiographical work, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau used the same 13 title in the 18th century, initiating the chain of confessional and highly self-critical, autobiographies of the Romantic era and beyond. The earliest known autobiography in

English is the early 15th-century Book of Margery Kempe, describing among other things her pilgrimage to the Holy Land and visit to Rome. The book remained in manuscript and was not published until 1936.Notable English autobiographies of the

17th century include those of Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1643, published 1764) and

John Bunyan (Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, 1666).

A memoir is slightly different in character from an autobiography. While an autobiography typically focuses on the "life and times" of the writer, a memoir has a narrower, more intimate focus on his or her own memories, feelings and emotions.

Memoirs have often been written by politicians or military leaders as a way to record and publish an account of their public exploits. One early example is that of Leonor

López de Córdoba (1362–1420) who wrote what is supposed to be the first autobiography in Spanish. The English Civil War(1642–1651) provoked a number of examples of this genre, including works by Sir Edmund Ludlow and Sir John Reresby.

French examples from the same period include the memoirs of Cardinal de Retz(1614–

1679) and the Duc de Saint-Simon.

Notable 18th century autobiographies in English include those of Edward

Gibbon and Benjamin Franklin. Following the trend of Romanticism, which greatly emphasised the role and the nature of the individual, and in the footsteps of Jean-

Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, a more intimate form of autobiography, exploring the subject's emotions, came into fashion. An English example is William Hazlitt’s Liber

Amoris (1823), a painful examination of the writer's love-life.

With the rise of education, cheap newspapers and cheap printing, modern concepts of fame and celebrity began to develop, and the beneficiaries of this were not 14 slow to cash in on this by producing autobiographies. It became the expectation—rather than the exception—that those in the public eye should write about themselves—not only writers such as Charles Dickens (who also incorporated autobiographical elements in his novels) and Anthony Trollope, but also politicians (e.g. Henry Brooks Adams), philosophers (e.g. John Stuart Mill), churchmen such as Cardinal Newman, and entertainers such as P. T. Barnum. Increasingly, in accordance with romantic taste, these accounts also began to deal, amongst other topics, with aspects of childhood and upbringing—far removed from the principles of "Cellinian" autobiography.

From the 17th century onwards, "scandalous memoirs" by supposed libertines, serving a public taste for titillation, have been frequently published. Typically pseudonymous, they were (and are) largely works of fiction written by ghostwriters.

So-called "autobiographies" of modern professional athletes and media celebrities— and to a lesser extent about politicians, generally written by a ghostwriter, are routinely published. Some celebrities, such as Naomi Campbell, admit to not having read their

"autobiographies". Some sensationalist autobiographies such as James Frey's "A

Million Little Pieces" have been publicly exposed as having embellished or fictionalized significant details of the authors' lives.

Autobiography has become an increasingly popular and widely accessible form.

With the critical and commercial success in the United States of such memoirs as

Angela’s Ashes and The Color of Water, more and more people have been encouraged to try their hand at this genre. Victims and opponents of totalitarian and other governmental regimes have been able to present striking critiques of these regimes through autobiographical accounts of their experience. Among such works are the writings of Primo Levi, one of many personal accounts of the Shoah. Similarly, there 15 are many works detailing atrocities and malevolence of Communist regimes (e.g.,

Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope against Hope).

The term "fictional autobiography" signifies novels about a fictional character written as though the character were writing their own autobiography, meaning that the character is the first-person narrator and that the novel addresses both internal and external experiences of the character. Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders is an early example. Charles Dickens' David Copperfield is another such classic, and J.D.

Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye is a well-known modern example of fictional autobiography. Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is yet another example of fictional autobiography, as noted on the front page of the original version. The term may also apply to works of fiction purporting to be autobiographies of real characters, e.g.,

Robert Nye's Memoirs of Lord Byron.

Thus Autobiographical works are by nature subjective. The inability—or unwillingness—of the author to accurately recall memories has in certain cases resulted in misleading or incorrect information. Some sociologists and psychologists have noted that autobiography offers the author the ability to recreate history.

The following research is done on Maya Angelou’s Autobiographies. She has written seven autobiographies. Her autobiographies deals with the themes like racism, identity, family and travel. The autobiographies taken for study are I Know Why the

Caged Bird Sings(1969), Gather Together in My Name (1974), Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (1976), The Heart of a Woman (1981), All God's

Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986).

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969: In Caged Bird, Angelou describes her efforts to adapt to the role of a young Black girl, the painfully humorous failures and the gradual realization of how to transcend the restrictions. 16

Gather Together in My Name (1974): Gather Togethertells the story of a young mother’s struggle to achieve respect, love and a sense of self-worth. Angelou’s belief in herself and her struggle to gain financial independence form the major theme of this work.

Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (1976): The third autobiography concentrates on the early years of her career as a professional dancer and singer, her relative experience with racial prejudice, and with the guilt suffered through separation from her young son.

The Heart of a Woman (1981): In this autobiography, Angelou underscores the illusory nature of her fantasy about marriage to show how her perspective has shifted over the years and how much understanding she has gained about life in general.

All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986):Angelou focuses primarily on the story of her and many other Black American’s attempts in the early 1960s return to the ancestral home in Africa. She explores the theme of displacement and the difficulties involved in creating a home for oneself, one’s family and one’s people.

Angelou's autobiographies can be placed in the African-American literature tradition of political protest. Their unity underscored one of Angelou's central themes: the injustice of racism and how to fight it. She uses the autobiography to reimagine ways of writing about women's lives and identities in a male-dominated society. Her original goal was to write about the lives of Black women in America, but it evolved in her later volumes to document the ups and downs of her life.

Angelou has used the autobiographies for self-evaluation and self-expression and has come to terms with the ‘Black’ self. To some ‘Black’ gives a sense of shame, self-denigration and self-hatred. To Angelou, it is a source of pride, through initially it was self- limiting. Her vision of nurturing family and cohesive community has 17 strengthened her. Some measures of stability which graces her life is based on mutual need, reciprocal respect and shared compassion which oppression encouraged in the

Blacks.

Through exemplary gift of language she brings alive her struggles to maintain her personhood. All the five autobiographies converge upon one goal and chart the growth of an individual from childhood to adulthood, from innocence to knowledge, from a sense of impotence to a sense of dignity and from turbulence to serenity.

Angelou makes her autobiographies an exercise in exorcism of trauma to prevent further repetitions. She feels that telling her story is a way through the problems.

Dr. Maya Angelou is a remarkable Renaissance woman who is hailed as one of the great voices of contemporary literature. As a poet, educator, historian, best-selling author, actress, playwright, civil-rights activist, producer and director, she continues to travel the world, spreading her legendary wisdom. Within the rhythm of her poetry and elegance of her prose lies Angelou's unique power to help readers of every orientation span the lines of race. Angelou captivates audiences through the vigour and sheer beauty of her words and lyrics.

The research deals with the five chapters.

Chapter I deals with the study of American Literature, a general view of

American Writers, Maya Angelou, her life achievements, works and awards.

Chapter II introduces the life of Black American Women Writers and a study of the autobiographies of Maya Angelou.

Chapter III deals with the theme of family and family relationships, from the character-defining experience of Angelou’s life. Her relationship with her parents, husbands, sons, friends and lovers. 18

Chapter IV deals with the theme of Racism in Maya Angelou’s autobiographies. She talks about the life of the African American women, the injustice done to them and their fight towards it.

Chapter V concludes exploring Angelou, as a woman, demonstrating the formation of her own cultural identity throughout her narratives. She presents herself as a role model for African-American women by reconstructing the Black woman's image throughout her autobiographies, and has used her many roles, incarnations, and identities to connect the layers of oppression with her personal history. Chapter II

A Study of Black American Writings and Maya Angelou’s Autobiographies

The French word ‘genre’ means a classification of literary works according to type – lyric, narrative, dramatic – which are further divided into novel, short story, epic poem, tragedy, and so forth. Autobiography is a major literary form of genre. Broken down, the word ‘auto/bio/graphy’ means self/life/history, the narrative of events in a person’s life. It is also known as life writing or the literature of self-revelation.

According to Alfred Kazin, autobiography “uses fact as a strategy [it is a] history of a self, [and exhibits a] concern for the self as a character” (213).

Most readers of autobiographies have clear expectations about the characteristics of the genre. First, it should be written rather than spoken. Second, it must have a first-person narrator. Third, it should be of manageable length, one or two volumes. Fourth, it should be arranged chronologically, in an order that roughly corresponds to the significant events of the narrator’s life. Autobiographies written before the Civil War have taken numerous forms, among them traveller’s narratives, diaries, success stories, Indian narratives and religious confessions.

African American autobiography has its historical roots in still another genre, the slave narrative. Through this method of speaking and writing, slaves recalled the harrowing journey from Africa to America and the atrocities of plantation life. It is a genre that Stephen Butterfield (1974) and many other critics believe to be the foundation of African American autobiographical tradition and a genre that many contemporary writers, Angelou among them, have incorporated into their fiction, their autobiographies, their drama, their poetry. 20

The history of Afro-American autobiography is long and full. A recent bibliography of Black American autobiographies, for example lists 417 works written between 1865 and 1973. Today the Black American continues to use the form of autobiography because they feel that it is an efficacious means for conveying their views of their relationship with society. In America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, thousands of former slaves set down the history of their escape from bondage into freedom in writings which came to be called “slave narratives” and to be identified as an independent genre. Some of the important Black American autobiographies were

Angela Davis’s Autobiography, Nate Shaw’s life history in All God’s Dangers, Booker

T. Washington’s memorable Up from Slavery (1901) etc.

In 1930s however, the genre was further expanded by the addition of over 2,000 oral narratives: the interviews with former slaves who were conducted as part of the

Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration and collected in over

10,000 pages in the Library of Congress. The emotional drive of the written narrative, as with traditional church testimonial, is toward the reader or listener, whereas the impact of the oral narratives, as with traditional blues, is first upon the individual writer or singer himself; the former assumes an external community, whereas the latter seeks to create a community through the sharing of psychic experiences in the process of their articulation. Black autobiography, then, has a testimonial as well as a blues mode.

In both the written and the oral autobiographies, however, the individual discovers himself to be and describes himself as a member of the black community.

Traditional autobiography, called “a distinctive product of western post-Roman civilization” (Pascal 180), focuses emphatically upon the individual. Autobiographical confession is from subject to object, from the individual to the community or creed.

Characteristics of the black autobiography, however, is the fact that the individual and 21 the community are not polarities; there is a community of fundamental identification between ‘I’ and ‘We’ within any single autobiography in spite of differences in autobiographical modes and in the autobiographer’s vision. St. Claire Drake maintains:

The genre of the Afro-American autobiography is one in which is more

intimate aspects of the autobiographer’s personal experience are

subordinated to social commentary and reflections upon what it means

to be a Negro in a world dominated by White Men. The traumatic

effects of the black experience seem to have confessional writing an

intellectual luxury black writers cannot afford. (158)

The slave narrative is structured in the form of a journey, from Africa to America or to some other unchosen location in the African diaspora – a term used to describe the scattering of black people during the slave trade. The concept of the journey is as old as song, as old as literature. Homer used the journey of the Greek hero, Odysseus, to establish a sequence of events in his classical epic The Odyssey, recorded around 850

B.C. The journey is an integral structure in the West African epic Son-Jara and in the various Indian epics as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.

The slave narrative was the recollection by a former slave of his/her struggle in crossing the Atlantic from Africa to America. Traditionally, it traces the journey of a slave or former slave of African descent in his/her quest for freedom. Freedom for many narrators meant more than release from the imprisoning system of slavery; it also meant the opportunity to write or print their stories and at the same time denounce the institution that had bound them. Of the written narratives, many celebrated the achievement of literacy – of being able to read and write – as a major theme. Literacy was equated in the slave’s mind with liberation, whereas illiteracy was a form of bondage enforced by slave owners and overseers. 22

Many black professionals have written different kinds of autobiographies that may be called first-person success narratives. This genre, meant to offer helpful models for young black men and women, is important to the black tradition because it encourages a positive response from a community where drugs and easy money are often more highly rewarded than hard work.

The prison autobiography is the genre most directly relate to the earliest black narrative form, the slave narrative; they share many themes, among them captivity, self-education and the desire to escape. This achieved prominence in the period surrounding the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, through the writings of Eldridge

Cleaver, George Jackson, Angela Davis, Malcolm X and other articulate defenders of the black liberation movement.

Within the last fifteen years, Maya Angelou has become one of the best-known black writers in the United States. Her reputation rests firmly on her prolific career as an autobiographer, poet, dancer-singer, actress, producer, director, scriptwriter, political, activist and editor. Throughout her life, she has identified with the South, and she calls Stamps, Arkansas, where she spent ten years of her childhood, her home.

Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Annie Johnson on 4 April 1928 in St. Louis to

Vivian Baxter and Bailey Johnson, a civilian dietitian for the U.S Navy. At age three, when her parents’ marriage ended in divorce, she was sent, along with her brother,

Bailey, from Long Beach to Stamps to be cared for by their paternal grandmother, Mrs.

Annie Henderson.

During the next ten years, a time of severe economic depression and intense racial bigotry in the South, she spent nearly all of her time either in school, at the daily meetings of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, or at her grandmother’s general merchandise store. In 1940, she graduated with top honors from the Lafayette County 23

Training School and soon thereafter returned to her mother, who lived in the San

Francisco-Oakland area at that time. There she continued her education at George

Washington High School under the direction of her beloved Miss Kirwin. At the same time, she attended evening classes at the California Labor School, where she received a scholarship to study drama and dance. A few weeks after she received her high school diploma, she gave birth to her son, Guy Bailey Johnson.

Her career as a professional entertainer began on the West Coast, where she performed as a dancer-singer at the Purple Onion in the early 1950’s. While working in this popular cabaret, she was spotted by members of the Porgy and Bess cast and invited to audition for the chorus. Upon her return from the play’s 1954-55 tour of

Europe and Africa, she continued to perform at nightclubs throughout the United

States, acquiring valuable experiences that would eventually lead her into new avenues of professional work.

In 1959, Angelou and her son moved to New York, where she soon joined the

Harlem Writers Guild at the invitation of John Killens. Together with Godfrey

Cambridge, she produced, directed and starred in Cabaret for Freedom to raise funds for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Following the close of the highly successful show, she accepted the position of Northern coordinator for the SCLC at the request of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Her work in theatre landed her role of the White Queen in Genet’s The Blacks, directed by Gene Frankel at St. Mark’s Playhouse. For this production, she joined a cast of stars – Poscoe Lee Brown, Godfrey Cambridge, James Earl Jones and Cicely Tyson.

In 1974, she adapted Sophocles’ Ajax for its premiere at the Mark Taper Forum in Los

Angles. Original screenplays to her credit include the film version of Georgia, Georgia and the television productions of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and The Sisters. 24

She also authored and produced a television series on African traditions inherent in

American culture and played the role of KunteKinte’s grandmother in Roots. For PBS programming, she served as a guest interviewer on Assignment America and most recently appeared in a special series on creativity hosted by Bill Moyers, which featured a return visit to Stamps.

Among her other honors, Maya Angelou was appointed to the Commission of

International Women’s Year by former President Carter. In 1975, Ladies’ Home

Journal named her Woman of the Year in communications. A trustee of the American

Film Institute, she is also one of the few women members of the Directors Guild. In recent years, she has received more than a dozen honorary degrees, including one from the University of Arkansas located near her childhood home.

Fluent in seven languages, she has worked as the editor of the Arab Observer in

Cairo and the African Review in Ghana. In December 1981, Angelou accepted a lifetime appointment as the first Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake

Forest University in Winston-Salem, where she lectures on literature and popular culture. In 1983, Women in Communications presented her with the Matrix Award in the fields of books.

Her personal life has been anything but smooth. As a young mother, Angelou had to endure painful periods of separation from her son while she worked at more than one job to support them. Often her ventures into show business would take her far from home, and she would put Guy in the care of her mother or baby-sitters. When she was twenty-one years old, she married ended after three years. While working in New York, she met and later married Vusumzi Make, a black South African activist who travelled extensively raising money to end apartheid. They divided their time between New York and Cairo, but after a few years their marriage deteriorated. In 1973, Angelou married 25

Paul du Feu, a carpenter and construction worker she had met in London. They lived together on the West Coast during most of their seven-year marriage.

Although she is rarely called a regional writer, Maya Angelou is frequently identified with the new generation of Southern writers. She has always called the South her home, and recently, after much deliberation, she settled in North Carolina, ending an absence of more than thirty years. Her autobiographies and poetry are rich with references to her childhood home in Arkansas to the South in general. For Angelou, as for many black American writers, the South has become a powerfully evocative metaphor for the history of racial bigotry and social inequality, for brutal inhumanity and final failure.

Yet the South also represents a life-affirming force energized by somewhat spiritual bond to the land itself. It is a region where generations of black families have sacrificed their brightest dreams for a better future; yet it is here that ties to forebears whose very blood has nourished the soil a black child could grow up freely or reach her full intellectual and social potential, but the town was nevertheless the home of

Angelou’s grandmother, who came to stand for all the courage and stability she ever knew as child.

Her literary reputation is based on the publication of her volumes of autobiography. I Know Why the Caged Birds Sings, Gather Together in My Name,

Singin and Swingin and Getting Merry Like Christmas, The Heart of a Woman and All

God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes and five volumes of Poetry – Just Give Me A

Cool Drink of Water Force I Diiie, Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well, And

Still I Rise, Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing? And Now Sheba Sings the Song.

In the twenty years of her publishing history, she has developed a rapport with her audiences who wait each new work as continuation of an on going dialogue with 26 the author. Beginning with Caged Bird in 1970, her works have received wide critical acclaim and have been praised for reaching universal truths while examining the complicated life of one individual. The broad appeal of her autobiographies and poetry is evidenced in the numerous college anthologies that include portions of her work and in the popularity of the television adaptation of Caged Bird. In years to come,

Angelou’s voice, already recognized as one of the most original and versatile, will be measured by the standards of great American writers of our time.

Maya Angelou’s autobiographies are classified as autobiographical fiction by a number of critics. This is because Angelou amplifies the autobiographical tone by using dialogue and having characters to speak the narrative. Eugenia Collier states that “the writing techniques Angelou uses in her autobiographies are the same as the devices used in writing fiction: vividly conceived characters and careful development of theme, setting, plot and language” (22). But Angelou insists in calling her works autobiographies and not novels. In an interview, she tells Jacky Kay that “I think I am the only serious writer who has chosen the autobiographical form as the main form to carry my work, my expression”(195).

Certain elements common to all standard autobiographies: first is “character” which designates the narrator, the one who tells the story and acts within it, as opposed to the more distanced “author”. The second element, “technique”, includes stylistic concerns such as metaphors, structure and verb tense. The third element is “theme”, which addresses not only personal issues like love and death, but also political, cultural and historical matters affecting the autobiographer.

In Angelou’s case, the works deal with the Great Depression of the early 1930s, the civil-rights movement in America in the 1960s and the liberation movements in

Africa in the same decade. Other than their length and thematic material, Angelou’s 27 autobiographies conform to the standard structure of the autobiography: they are written, they are single-authored and they are chronological. The five volumes that make up Angelou’s series far exceed the standard number of volumes in an autobiography, so much so that they are in a sub-genre known as “serial autobiographies”.

A serial autobiography is a set of two or more related texts that reflect on, predict, and echo each other, so that they are seen as parts of a whole. Angelou enjoys the multiple form, the stretching required in going from book to book. She states

“I pray that in each book that I am getting closer to finding the mystery of really manipulating and being manipulated by this medium, to pulling it open, stretching it”

(Kay 195). In Design and Truth in Autobiography (1960), Roy Pascal theorizes that autobiography must be presentation of truth – truth in characterization, truth in relationship to the world, truth in point of view. Angelou’s views to some extent diverge from the conventional notion of autobiography as truth.

In an interview, Angelou stated:

Certain things overstate the facts . . . I want to always leave something

for the reader to do, to imagine, to fantasize. I want to tell the truth but

I can’t because I’d ruin the thing. . . . If I tell the truth . . . in language

which shocks but does not terrify, which shakes somebody up but

doesn’t make them run away, I may impart something which might be of

help. (Icon June 16, 1997)

What frequently goes unsaid when discussing the so-called truth in the history of

African American autobiography is that in many instances the truth has been censored or hidden out of the need for self-protection. Black autobiographies writing during the abolitionist movement – the antislavery movement that flourished during the several 28 decades before the Civil War, had to restrain or disguise their opinions, even toward their compassionate editors. Slave narratives withheld certain ideas that might have put the slave teller in danger, no matter how well intentioned the transcribe might be – secret hopes for rebellion; a buried contempt for white men as rapists; and other hostile opinions towards self, race and resistance.

The nineteenth-century slave narrator, a recognized victim of slavery, was supposed to give an honest account of life under the plantation system, with its beatings from white overseers and sexual abuses from brutal white owners. What the slave wrote not only had to be true, but its truth had to be upheld or verified, in the preface or appendix, by conscientious white editors, publishers and friends. Although Maya

Angelou identifies with slavery and verifies its power in her life and works, her concept of truth and black womanhood is transformed by its contemporary content. The specific truth that Angelou tells is the truth about the lives of black women. From this perspective Angelou is able to correct historical errors and offer a role model often seen in American culture.

Maya Angelou’s literary significance rests upon her exceptional ability to tell her life story as both as human being and a black American woman in the twentieth century. The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance. Angelou’s autobiographies and vivid lectures about herself, ranging in tone from warmly humorous to bitterly satiric, have won a popular and critical following that is both respectful and enthusiastic.

As she adds successive volumes to her life story, she is performing for contemporary black American women – and men, too – many of the same functions 29 that escaped slave Fredrick Douglass performed for his nineteenth-century peers through his autobiographical writings and lectures. Both become articulators of the nature and validity of a collective heritage as they interpret the particulars of a culture for a wide audience of whites as well as blacks; as one critic said, Angelou illuminates

“with the intensity of lightning the tragedy that was once this nation’s two-track culture” (Arensberg 76). As people who have lived varied and vigorous lives, they embody the quintessential experiences of their race and culture.

Maya Angelou’s autobiographies can be compared to the autobiographies of

Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Brooks, Anne Moody, Nikki Giovanni, Lillian

Hellmann, Angela Davis etc. These writers portray Africa either as a dream or a nightmare. They are disappointed when the Africa of their travels fails to equal the

Africa of their imaginations. They share their primary relationships among African

American expatriates who share romanticized views of Africa as mother.

Like many Americans in Africa, they base their experience on distorted images rather than reality. Using the narrative structure of the black American who goes to Africa.

Angelou and other writers reverse the order of history. Where black Africans were once brought in bondage to America, so black Americans retrace the journey back to Africa, their travel books become reflections of the impact that African captivity and African nationhood have had on their own lives.

Selwyn R. Cudjoe has observed that Angelou, who was consciously writing within an African American autobiographical tradition, often uses the ‘we’ instead of the ‘I’ point of view, moving from the perspective of the single person to that of the group. He contends that, like the slave narrative, her books are more public than private, more concerned with collective experiences than with subjective concerns. 30

Angelou, who is aware of her collective point of view, told an interviewer that she is always trying to convert the first-person singular into the first person plural.

Angelou’s narrative combines two distinct characteristics of the slave narrative.

It demonstrates both the narrative of movement and narrative of confinement, a theme common to all imprisoned slave narrators, but having a special significance for women, who were more concerned with the problems of sexual exploitation, rape, loss of dignity and forsaken children than were male slaves because under the slave system the nuclear family structure was discouraged or forbidden or disrupted when a slave was sold.

Like the nineteenth-century female slave narrator, Maya Angelou charts their journey toward autonomy. Abandoned by her parents, raped by her mother’s boyfriend, separated from her grandmother, the young Maya is imprisoned and unable to claim her own identity. Her journey toward self-discovery takes her from ignorance to knowledge, from silence to speech, from racial oppression to a liberated life, as she travels from Stamps, Arkansas, to Accra, Ghana, and back to America. Her story thus echoes the course of the slave narrative, with its movement from Africa to America, its account of the cruelties of slavery, and its ultimate hope for emancipation.

For Angelou, who writes a personal version of the Emancipation Proclamation, her demoralizing childhood experiences with racial bigotry and sexual assault are largely overcome as she continues her efforts to be somebody – a writer, a dancer, a nonslave. In all her autobiographies, the format of the slave narrative is enhanced through the African settings and the expanse of her journeys. Angelou connects herself to the slave narrative by consciously linking herself to an African-centered tradition.

Her triumph owes much to her rediscovery of her African heritage and her ability to redefine herself as mother and woman. 31

Another prominent influence on Angelou’s work is the Negro spiritual, a musical form that originated during the ‘great revival’ meetings of the early nineteenth century. This music grew from Protestant camp meetings that were attended by both whites and blacks. During the 1920s and 1930s, people were dedicated to promote the

Negro spiritual as a pure artistic form. Angelou utilizes the spiritual for its thematic and symbolic connotations in presenting one of her major themes, her transformational journey to Africa and back.

Angelou’s autobiographies are informed not only by her experiments in poetic form but also by her journey into Asian, African and African American literature. In her view, anyone who emerges from the journey of life is an autobiographer. She thus draws all God’s children into her encompassing definition of what makes an autobiographer. She states “Each one is an autobiographer. . . . So I think we’re all on journeys, according to how we’re able to travel, overcome, and share what we have learned” (Icon 1997).

I Know Why the Caged Birds Sings is the first of Maya Angelou’s autobiographies. It covers her life from the age of three, when her parents send her and her brother Bailey to live with their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson, in

Stamps, Arkansas, until the age of sixteen, when she becomes a mother. Annie

Henderson is the main influence on her childhood. When Maya and Bailey are eight and nine, respectively, they travel to St. Louis, where his mother, Vivian Baxter, and their maternal grandmother were leading a far more sophisticated life than anything

Maya had known in Arkansas. There are more parties and fewer church gatherings.

Maya was very fond of her Momma who was everything to her.

People spoke of Momma as a good looking woman and some, who

remembered her youth, said she used to be right pretty. I saw only her 32

power and strength. She was taller than any woman in my personal

world, and her hands were so large they could span my head from ear to

ear. Her voice was soft only because she chose to keep it so. (CB 45)

In the loose atmosphere of St. Louis, Maya is raped by her mother’s boyfriend,

Mr. Freeman, who warns her to be silent or he will kill her brother Bailey. After the trial, Freeman dies after being violently beaten, presumably by Maya’s uncles. Maya loses her speech for some time. The silent Maya is returned to Momma Henderson, remaining speechless for five years until she recovers her voice.

As Maya emerges from the traumas of childhood, she gains strength from reading literature and graduates with honors from the eighth grade. Soon after graduation, she and Bailey moved to San Francisco, where their mother, Vivian, was living with her new husband, Daddy Clidell. There, Maya simultaneously attends

George Washington High School and on a part-time basis, a Marxist labor school. At the latter she took courses in dance and theatre that will prove invaluable in her career.

Worried that she might be a lesbian, Maya engages in sex with a young man from the neighbourhood to disprove her fears. The sixteen-year-old girl, supported financially and emotionally by her parents, gives birth to a son, who becomes the focus of the remaining four autobiographies.

This autobiography makes use of the first person narrative, even though there are many moments that sound more like fiction than autobiography. Caged Bird is told by a child who is artfully recreated by the adult narrator. From a child’s perspective,

Maya records her separation from her mother and father, and her strong religious and communal connections, shared with her paternal grandmother. Revealing her life story through a narrator who is a Southern Black female who is at times a child, at times a mother, Maya Angelou introduces a unique point of view to American autobiography. 33

The plot of Caged Birds begins when Maya and her brother Bailey arrive in

Stamps, Arkansas, to live with their paternal grandmother and her crippled son Willie.

It covers thirteen years of chronological time, from Maya’s third to sixteenth year. Of the various incidents in the plot that have a negative effect on Maya, two of them are extremely disruptive being raped on a visit to St. Louis at the age of eight, and becoming pregnant as a result of trying to prove to herself that she is not a lesbian.

The second major event in the plot is Maya’s decision to test her feminity by having sex, an action that results in pregnancy. For Maya, the pregnancy ends in her mother’s acceptance and the birth of her son. Sidonie Ann Smith connects the ending and the birth to Maya’s affirmation of self: “with the birth of her child Maya is herself born into a mature engagement with the forces of life”(374).

In her evolution from child to woman, Maya fills reader’s imaginations as have very few similar characters in American autobiography. Alfred Kazin argues that recreating those early years offers the autobiographer the greatest incentive. Childhood

, he contends, is the perfect perspective for revealing the self, in part because the narrator derives pleasure from transferring the informed thoughts of an adult into the imaginative visions of a child.

This section investigates Maya’s character as a child and young adult, with attention to how she acts and is acted in three specific areas: in the family, in the black community, and in the white community. Maya’s performance in these areas reveals the diversity of her character and gives a sense of the various moods, attitudes and strategies involved in her survival as a black child in a world manipulated by image of whiteness. Maya’s interaction with her mother, brother, son and grandmother tend to order and solidify her experiences. Although these are all strong relationships, Maya’s 34 ties with her grandmother are probably the most important in forming her character.

She states:

Although there was always generosity in the Negro neighbourhood, it

was indulged on pain of sacrifice. Whatever was given by Black people

to other Blacks was most probably needed as desperately by the donor

as by the receiver. . . . I couldn’t understand whites and where they got

the right to spend money so lavishly. Of course, I knew God was white

too, but no one could have made me believe he was prejudiced. (CB 48)

In the first autobiography, Maya Angelou calls displacement the most important loss in her childhood, because she is separated from her mother and father at the age of three and never fully regains a sense of security and belonging. Her displacement from her family is not only an emotional handicap but is compounded by an equally unsettling sense of racial and geographic displacement. Her parents frequently move

Angelou and her brother, Bailey from St. Louis to Arkansas to the West Coast.

As young children in Stamps the 1930’s, racial prejudice severely limits their lives. Within the first pages, she sums up this demoralizing period of alienation. She states “if growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat” (CB 57). The pain of her continual rejection comes not only from the displacement itself, but even more poignantly, from the child’s acute understanding of prejudice. A smooth, clean razor would be enough of a threat, but a rusty, jagged one leaves no doubt in the victim’s mind.

In Caged Bird, Angelou recounts many explosive incidents of the racial discrimination she experienced as a child. In the 1930’s, Stamps was a fully segregated town. Marguerite and Bailey, however, are welcomed by a grandmother who is not 35 only devoted to them but, as owner of the Wm. Johnson General Merchandise Store, is highly successful and independent. Momma is their most constant source of love and strength. She says “I saw only her power and strength. She was taller than any woman in my personal world, and her hands were so large they could span my head from ear to ear” (CB 65).

As powerful as a grandmother’s presence seems to Marguerite, Momma uses her strength solely to guide and protect her family but not to confront the white community directly. Momma’s resilient power usually reassures Marguerite, but one of the child’s most difficult lessons teaches her that racial prejudice in Stamps can effectively circumscribe and even defeat her grandmother’s protective influence. In fact, it is only in the autobiographical narrative that Momma’s personality begins to loom larger than life and provides Angelou’s memories of childhood with a sense of personal dignity and meaning.

On one occasion, for example, Momma takes Marguerite to the local dentist to be treated for a severe toothache. The dentist, who is ironically named Lincoln, refuses to treat the child, even though he is indebted to Momma for a loan she extended to him during the depression. As a silent witness to this scene, Marguerite suffers not only from the pain of her two decayed teeth, which have been reduced to tiny enamel bits by the avenging “Angel of the candy counter”, but also from the utter humiliation of the dentist’s bigotry as well. She says pathetically “it seemed terribly unfair to have a toothache and a headache and have to bear at the same time the heavy burden of

Blackness” (CB 71).

In the child’s imagined version, fantasy comes into play as the recounted scene ventures into the unreal or the impossible. Momma becomes a sort of superwoman of enormous proportions, ‘ten feet tall with eight-foot arms’, and comes to the helpless 36 child’s rescue. In this alternate vision, Angelou switches to fantasy to suggest the depth of the child’s humiliation and the residue of pain even after her two bad teeth have been pulled. Fantasy, finally, is used to demonstrate the undiminished strength of the character of Momma. Summarizing the complete anecdote, Angelou attest, “I preferred, much preferred, my version”. Carefully selected elements of fiction and fantasy in the scene involving Dr.Lincoln and her childhood hero, Momma, partially compensate for the racial displacement that she experiences as a child.

When Angelou is thirteen, she and Bailey leave the repressive atmosphere of

Stamps to join their mother. During these years, she continues to look for a place in life that will dissolve her sense of displacement. By the time she and bailey are in their early teens, they have criss-crossed the western half of the country travelling between their parents’ separate homes and their grandmothers’ in Stamps.

Her sense of geographic displacement alone would be enough to upset any child’s security, since the life-styles of her father in southern California and her mother in St. Louis and later in San Francisco represent worlds completely different and even foreign to the pace of life in the rural South. Each time the children move, a different set of relatives or another of their parents’ lovers greets them, and they never feel a part of a stable family group, except when they are in Stamps at the general store with

Momma and Uncle Willie.

Once settled in San Francisco in the early 1940s, Angelou enrols at George

Washington High School and the California Labor School, where she studies dance and drama in evening classes. She excels in both schools, and her teachers quickly recognize her intelligence and talent. Later she breaks the color barrier by becoming the first black female conductor on the San Francisco streetcars. Just months before her high school graduation, she engages in a onetime sexual encounter to prove her 37 sexuality to herself and becomes pregnant. Caged Bird, however ends on a note of strength and confidence in her ability to succeed and find her place in life. As autobiographer, Angelou uses the theme of displacement to unify the first volume of her life story as well as to suggest her long-term determination to create security and permanency in her life.

Between the conclusion of Caged Bird and the beginning of Angelou’s second volume of autobiography, Gather Together in My Name(1974), there is virtually no break in the narrative. As the first ends with the birth of her son, the second starts when

Guy is only a few months old. As a whole, the autobiography tells the story when Guy is only a few months old. As a whole, Gather Togethertells the story of his first three years and focuses on a young single mother’s struggle to achieve respect, love and a sense of self-worth. Her battle to win financial independence and the devotion of a faithful man could hardly have been easy in the years immediately following World

War II, when racial discrimination, unemployment and McCarthyism were all on the rise.

In spite of her initial optimism, which is, incidentally, shared by many members of the post-war black community who fervently believed that “race prejudice was dead”. A mistake made by a young country. Something to be forgiven as an unpleasant act committed by an intoxicated friend. Angelou soon realizes that her dreams for a better America are still too fragile to survive.But worst of all is the burden of guilt that rests on the shoulders of the seventeen-year-old mother who desperately believes that she must assume full adult responsibility. Fortunately, her mother encourages her to set high goals, to maintain her sense of dignity and self-worth and to work hard to succeed.

Her mother’s words come back to her throughout her life: “Anything worth doing is worth doing well,” and “be the best of anything you get into” (GT 47). 38

Gather Together in My Name begins in San Francisco shortly after the Second

World War. The illusion of racial equality in San Francisco during the war years begins to vanish. With white soldier reclaiming their lives as civilians, black workers were expected to return to their farms and black military heroes to their ghettos. Angelou’s prefatory observations about race and the job market are intended to place the autobiographer within an historic framework, with her personal economic situation echoing the post war decline of African American society. She writes about the impact after the war and the sacrifices made by many people.

All the sacrifices had won us victory and now the good times were

coming. Obviously, if we earned more than rationing would allow us to

spend during wartime, things were really going to look up when

restrictions were removed. There was no need to discuss racial

prejudice. Hadn’t we all, black and white, just snatched the remaining

Jews from the hell of concentration camps? Race prejudice was dead.

(GT 4)

At seventeen, Maya looks for a job that will bring her recognition, money and independence, but she lacks the skills necessary to achieve these goals in a dominant white economy. Additionally, she believes, as her mother and stepfather, who have supported her, and define a new life for herself and for her two-month-old son. Leaving her family thus creates a double bind for the struggling single mother; she depends on them, but at the same time she wants to be independent.

Gather Together traces Maya’s emergence into the world of work, carefully recounting her pursuit of economic stability as she moves from job to job – from Creole cook, to dancer, to prostitute, to fry cook. During the course of the autobiography she sometimes acts irresponsibly, when she endangers the safety of her son who is 39 kidnapped by a baby-sitter. She also exposes herself to a number of risky relationships with men; a dancer; a married man who sells stolen clothes; a vein-scarred drug user.

At the end of the autobiography, she is finally saved when her most reliable friend,

Troubador Martin, demonstrates the dangers of drug addiction by walking her through a heroin den. Shocked and repentant, Angelou, in a promise to reclaim her innocence, abandons her degenerate life and vows to return with her son to her mother’s protection. Maya was more concerned in taking care of her son.

I had been rather reluctant to leave him in her charge, but Mother

reminded me that, she tended her white, black and Filipino children

equally well. I reasoned that her great age had shoved her beyond the

pale of any racial differences. Certainly anyone who lived that long had

to spend any unused moments thinking about death and the life to come.

(GT 14)

The plot of Gather Together is concerned with a young black woman who describes in detail the process of becoming an adult, emphasizing parenting, personal development, and survival. Survival in Angelou’s case, is defined as her perseverance in dealing with the emotional, racial, economic and relational aspects of her life. Her apprehensions about her son, coupled with her recurring sense of being an inadequate mother, create a special kind of tension, repeated and interconnected as the plot is relocated from one autobiography to the next. The plot resembles a walk through the underworld, with

Angelou’s salvation at the end hoped for but in no way guaranteed. She is still a girl, unfinished, like autobiography itself. She is still a girl, unfinished, like autobiography itself. In the process of becoming, the narrator, like the plot, is “open-ended and incomplete . . . always in process” (Olney 25). 40

The construction of the plot of Angelou’s third autobiography Singin’ and

Swingin’ and Getting’ Merry Like Christmas is best described as the effective placement of opposing incidents and attitudes. It explores a variety of issues affecting

Angelou’s life – from motherhood, making a living, being a wife, being a grandchild.

Angelou in her twenties struggles to provide herself and her son with fundamental needs but unwilling to go on welfare. She is offered a job selling records, which she wants to do, but she distrusts the white woman who owns the store. She takes the job.

At the shop, she meets a Greek sailor whose knowledge of black music is equal to her own. She wants to marry him but she is suspicious. He is white but he is also Greek.

She marries him but there are conflicts. They later go in for a divorce. She begins her own business for an income.

When I first opened the shop, all the neighbourhood kids came in. They

either demanded that I gi’ them a penny – I hated whites imitation of the

Black accent – or play records for them. I explained that the only way

I’d give them anything was if they worked for it and that I’d play

records for their parents, but not for them until they were tall enough to

reach the turntables. (SS 8)

Angelou’s great love is for her son Guy, but she also needs a chance for her career to grow. She leaves Guy with her mother, Vivian Baxter, and dances in Europe,

Yugoslavia and Egypt. But while she is overseas she always misses her son. Vivian tells Maya that she has taken a job in a dealer in Las Vegas and that there’s no one to care for Guy. Maya leaves the tour, giving one month’s notice, although she wants to stay. At the end she is reunited with her son, but he falls sick. Later they go to Hawaii together. 41

Like many young women who came of age in the post war era, Angelou easily imagines herself moving into life modelled on Good Housekeeping and Better Homes and Gardens. She describes herself as both a product of ‘Hollywood upbringing’ and her own ‘romanticism’ and continually envisions herself smoothly slipping into the role guaranteed by popular culture. Whenever she meets a man who might potentially fulfil her dream, she anticipates the enviable comfort of ‘settling down’. The scenario is always the same. She states:

I would always wear pretty aprons and my son would play in the Little

League. My husband would come home and smoke his pipe in the den

as I made cookies for the Scouts meeting, or we would live quietly in a

pretty little house and I’d have another child, a girl, and the two children

would climb over his knees and I would make three layer caramel cakes

in my electric kitchen until they went off to college. (GT 67)

These glamorous dreams, of course, never quite materialize, but Angelou maintains a hopeful outlook and a determination to support and protect herself and her infant son.

Her primary motivation during these early years of motherhood is to spare her son the insecurity and rejection she faced as a child. During these years, Angelou even works as an absentee madam and a prostitute, in hopes of achieving a regular family life and easing her unabiding sense of guilt over not being able to provide herself and her son with financial and familial security.

Yet Angelou understands that the hurdles she has to cross on her road to success are often higher than those set by her own expectations and standards of performance.

Although she spends the first years of her son’s life in California, both in the Bay Area and in San Diego, she often faces racial discriminations reminiscent of her childhood experiences in the South. At one point in Gather Together, when she suspects that her 42 thriving business as a madam of two-prostitute house will soon be uncovered by the police, Angelou returns to Stamps with her son, hoping to find the same comfort and protection she had known as a child.

Specifically, she seeks her grandmother’s ‘protective embrace’ and her

‘courage’ as well as ‘the shield of anonymity’, but she soon realizes that the South is not ready to welcome her and that she has outgrown its childhood protection. The five years she spent in school and working in California have broadened her horizons and convinced her of her right to be accepted on the basis of her character and intelligence.

But the South to which she returns is unchanged: “the town was halved by railroad tracks, the swift Red River and racial prejudice and above all the atmosphere was pressed down with the smell of old fears, and hates and guilt” (GT 75).

Not long after her arrival in Stamps, Angelou comes face to face with the double standards of racial discrimination during an unpleasant confrontation with a salesclerk in the white-owned general merchandise store. Although she attempts to explain to her grandmother why she refused to accept the clerk’s humiliating insults,

Momma warns her that her “principles” are all too flimsy a protection against the unrestrained contempt of bigotry: “You think ‘cause you’ve been to California these crazy people won’t kill you? You think because of your all-fired principle some of the men won’t feel like putting their white sheets on and riding over here to stir up trouble?

You do you’re wrong” (GT 66). That same day, her grandmother sends her back to

California where she and her son are somewhat more distanced from the lingering hatred of South. Not until the filming of a segment for Bill Moyer’s PBS on creativity thirty years later does Angelou return to her childhood home.

Upon her return to the Bay Area and to her mother’s home, she is more determined than ever to achieve independence and win the respect of others. Leaving 43 her son in the care of baby-sitters, she works long hours first as a dancer and entertainer and then as a short-order cook in Stockton. But as is often the case, the reality of her situation fails far below her ideal, and Angelou eventually turns to marijuana as a temporary consolation: “the pot has been important when I was alone and lonely, when my present was dull and the future uncertain” (GT 78).

During this period, she falls in love with an older man who is a professional gambler supported by prostitution. When his luck fails him, Angelou agrees to help him pay his debt by becoming a prostitute herself. She makes this sacrifice fully believing that after her man has regained his financial security, he will marry her and provide her with the fulfilment of her romantic dream. Rationalizing her decision, she compares prostitution to marriage. She pathetically states:

These are married women who are more whorish than a street prostitute

because they have sold their bodies for marriage licenses, and there are

some women who sleep with men for money who have great integrity

because they are doing it for a purpose. (GT 88)

But once again her dreams are disappointed, and she finds herself on her own at the end.

The second volume of her autobiography ends just before she decides to settle down with a man she pictures as an “ideal husband”, who is in fact a heroin addict and gambler. Before it is too late, Angelou learns that she is on the verge of embracing disaster and defeat. At the end, she regains her innocence through the lessons of a compassionate drug addict: “I had walked the precipice and seen it all; and at the critical moment, one man’s generosity pushed me safely away from the edge . . . I had given a promise and found my innocence. I swore I’d never lose it again” (GT81). With these words, ready to accept the challenge of a new, Angelou brings the second volume 44 of her life story to a close. In Gather Together in My Name, a title inspired by “the

Gospel of Mathew (18:20), she asks her family and readers to gather around her and bear witness to her past” (Draper 26).

The third volume of Maya Angelou’s autobiography, Singin and Swingin and

Getting Merry Like Christmas(1976) concentrates on the early years of her career as a professional dancer and singer, her related experience with racial prejudice, and with the guilt suffered through separation from her young son. During her childhood, her love for music grows through her almost daily attendance at the Colored Methodist

Episcopal Church in Stamps and through her dance classes in California. Music in fact is her closest companion and source of moral support during her first few months back in the San Francisco area.

She calls music her “refuge” during this period of her life and welcomes its protective embrace, into which she could “crawl into the spaces between the notes and curl her back to loneliness” (Neubauer 35). Without losing any time, she secures a job in sales and inventory at the Melrose Record Shop on Fillmore, which at the time served as a meeting place for musicians and music lovers of all description. In addition to earning enough money to quit her two previous jobs and bring her son home for the baby-sitter’s in the evening and on Sundays, Angelou also gains valuable exposure to the newest releases in blues and jazz and to an expansive circle of eccentric people.

Her sales position at the record shop is her first step into the world of entertainment. Her hours behind the cashier counter studying catalogs and helping customers make their selections bring her an easy familiarity with the newest stars and songs. Relying on her dance lessons and her trusted memory of popular lyrics, she later auditions for a position as a dancer at the Garden of Allah, where she is eventually 45 hired as the first black show girl. Unlike the three white women who are also featured in the nightly basis of her dance routines alone.

All of the dancers, however, are instructed to supplement their regular salary by selling B-grade drinks and bottles of champagne on commission to interested customers. At first reluctant to put herself at the mercy of fawning, flirtatious spectators, she soon learns to sell more drinks than any of the others, simply by giving away the house secret on the composition of the ginger ale and Seven-Up cocktails and the details of the commission sale. But her success evokes the jealousy of other women, and soon her first venture into professional entertainment comes to an end.

Through contacts established during her work at the Garden of Allah, Angelou auditons for an opening at the Purple Onion, a North Beach cabaret where she soon replaces JorieRremus and shares the nightly bill with Phyllis Diller. After lessons with her drama coach, Lyod Clark, who, incidentally, is responsible for coining her stage name, Maya Angelou, she polishes her style as an interpretative dancer and perfects a series of calypso songs that eventually comprise her regular act at the cabaret.

Although the audience at the Purple Onion has never been entertained by a performer like Angelou, she quickly becomes extremely popular and gains much wider exposure than she did as a dancer at the Garden of Allah. Many professional stars and talent scouts, visiting San Francisco from New York and Chicago, drop in at the Purple

Onion and some eventually invite her to audition for their shows. In 1954, for example,

Leonard Sillman brought his Broadway hit New Faces of 1953 to the Bay Area. When she learns through friends that Sillman needed a replacement for EarthaKitt, who would be leaving for an engagement in Las Vegas, she jumps at the chance to work with a cast of talented performers. 46

Even though she is invited to join the show, the management at the Purple

Onion refuses to release her from her contract. Her first real show business break, therefore, does not come until after she goes to New York to try out for a new

Broadway show called House of Flowers, starring Pearl Bailey and directed by Saint

Subber. While there she is unexpectedly asked to join the company of Porgy and Bess in the role of Ruby, just as the troupe is finishing up its engagement in Montreal and embarking on its first European tour. She accepts thereby launching her international career as a dancer-singer.

As her professional career in entertainment develops, Angelou worries about her responsibility to care for her young son and provide him with a secure family life.

In Singin’andSingin’, she continues to trace her pursuit of romantic ideals in the face of loneliness and disappointment. While working in the Melrose Record Shop, she meets

Tosh Angelos, a sailor of Greek-American heritage, and later marries him. Her first impression of marriage could not have been more idealistic:

At last I was a housewife, legally a member of that enviable tribe of

consumers whom security made fat as butter and who under no

circumstances considered living by bread alone, because their husbands

brought home the bacon. I had a son,a father for him, a husband and a

pretty home for us to live in. My life began to resemble a Good

Housekeeping advertisement. I cooked well-balanced meals and molded

fabulous jello deserts. My floors were dangerous with daily applications

of wax and our furniture slick with polish. (SS 67).

Unfortunately, after a year, Tosh and she begin to argue and recognize that their different attitudes stand in the way of true compatibility and trust. Her ‘Eden’ like homelife and ‘ ‘cocoon of safety’ begin to smother her sense of integrity and 47 independence. In her autobiography, she describes this difficult period as a time in which she felt a ‘sense of loss’, which suffused until she was suffocating within the vapors. When their marriage ends, Angelou again looks for a way to give her young child a stable home and a permanent sense of family security. Understandably, her son temporarily distrusts her and wonders whether she will stop loving him behind to be cared for by others.

Before she marries Tosh, she seriously questions the nature of inter-racial marriage and is advised by others, including her mother, to examine the relationship carefully. Throughout Singing’ and Swinging’, she studies her attitude toward white people and explains her growing familiarity with their life-styles and their acceptance of her as an equal within the world of entertainment. When she first meets her future

Greek-husband, she suspects that her racial heritage precludes the possibility of any kind of permanent relationship. Her southern childhood is too close, too vibrant in her memory: “I would never forgot the slavery tales, or my Southern past, where all whites, including the poor and ignorant, had the right to speak rudely to and even physically abuse any Negro they met. I knew the ugliness of white prejudice” (SS 75).

Although she discounts her suspicion in her dealings with Tosh Angelos, her deeply rooted fears stay close to the surface as she comes to associate with a large number of white artists and entertainers during her career as a dancer: “I knew you could never tell about white people. Negroes had survived centuries of inhuman treatment and retained their humanity by hoping for the best from their pale-skinned oppressors but at the same time being prepared for the worst” (SS 81).

Later during her role as Ruby in Porgy and Bess, which played throughout

Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, she observes the double standards of white people who readily accept black Americans in Europe, because they are fascinated by 48 their exotic forgiveness, but who are equally quick to discriminate against other people of color. In North Africa, she witnesses yet another version of racial bigotry in the way members of the Arab elite mistreat their African servants, “not realizing that auction blocks and whipping posts were too recent in our history for us [Black Americans] to be comfortable around slavish servants” (Draper 45).

While in Rome, Angelou decides to cut short her engagement with Porgy and

Bess, not because she has witnessed the complexities of racial prejudices but rather because she realizes that her son has suffered during her extended absence. Throughout her European tour, she carries the burden of guilt, which comes to characterize her early years of motherhood. Although she recognizes the pattern of abandonment emerging in her son’s life as it had in her own, she often sees not alternative than to accept a job and, with it, the pain of separation.

Finally, upon learning that her son has developed a severe and seemingly untreatable rash in her absence, she decides to return to San Francisco. Once there, she assumes full responsibility for ruining her beautiful son by neglect and for the devastation to his mind and body. Shortly after her return, Guy recovers, and together they reach their separation is now over for good. Singin’ and Swingin’ comes to a close as mother and son settle into a Hawaiian beach resort where she has just opened a new engagement at a nightclub. She achieves a longed for peace of mind as she comes to treasure her wonderful, dependently independent son.

In Angelou's third autobiography Singin and Swingin and Getting Merry Like

Christmas, in which she married a white man, she came into intimate contact with whites for the first time—whites very different from the racist people she encountered in her childhood. She discovered that her stereotypes of whites were developed to protect herself from their cruelty and indifference. Conditioned by earlier experiences, 49

Angelou distrusts everyone, especially whites. Nevertheless, she is repeatedly surprised by the kindness and goodwill of many whites she meets, and, thus, her suspicions begin to soften into understanding. In Singin' and Swingin', Angelou effectively demonstrated

"the inviolability of the African American personhood" as well as her own closely guarded defense of it. The neighbourhood was a great help to Maya and her son.

I hadn’t asked them for help (I couldn’t risk their refusal) and they loved

me. There was no motive on earth which would bring me, bowed, to beg

for aid from and institution which scorned me and a government which

ignored me. It had seemed that I would be locked in the two jobs and the

weekly baby-sitter terror until my life was done. Now with a good

salary, my son and I could move back into my mother’s house. (SS 14)

In order for her to have any positive relationships with whites and people of other races, Angelou had to re-examine her lingering prejudices when faced with the broader world full of whites. But it was a complex process because most of Angelou's experiences with whites were positive during this time. Angelou moved between the white and Black worlds, both defining herself as a member of her community and encountering whites in "a much fuller, more sensuous manner".

Angelou's experiences with the Porgy and Bess tour, as described in Singin' and

Swingin', expanded her understanding of other races and race relations as she met people of different nationalities during her travels. All these experiences were instrumental in Angelou's maturity and growth, and served as a basis for her later acceptance and tolerance of other races.

In the following autobiography, Maya in her early twenties, displays a sense of self-rejection that negates the more positive ending of Gather Together. She is distrustful of people who show an interest in her. For the lonely Maya, the major escape 50 is contemporary music. She frequently visits a record store on Film Street in Los

Angles, a place with turntables and stalls for listening to the newest records. Here she is befriended by white woman Louise Cox, who offers the suspicious Maya a job. Here she meets her first husband Tosh Angelos.

Throughout this troubled autobiography, Angelou’s emotions are focussed on her son Guy. She marries Tosh Angelos, in part to please her son. But the marriage is not workable and ends in divorce. Maya is once again a single mother – once again the person responsible for Guy’s needs, his well-being, his survival. Her achievements and failures as a mother-identified woman conflict with her aspirations for a career. These antagonisms form a pattern of tensions in this, Angelou’s most complex volume.

Angelou’s conflicts are concentrated in three basic areas: her marriage; her responsibilities as a mother, daughter and granddaughter, and her desire to experience the joy of herself. Two incidents in particular contribute to the feelings of dissatisfaction that permeate the book. One is the death of Maya’s beloved grandmother, Momma Henderson, the other is Angelou’s characterization of herself as someone out of tune, someone whose confusion over priorities leads her to certain regrettable errors in judgement. In the final scene, set in Hawaii, these uncertainties are partially resolved.

The Heart of a Woman(1980), the fourth in the autobiographical series, Maya

Angelou continues the account of her son’s youth and, in the process, repeatedly returns to the story of her childhood. The references to her childhood serve partly to create a textual link for readers who might be unfamiliar with the earlier volumes and partly to emphasize the suggestive similarities between her childhood and her son’s burden too. In a brief of flashback in the second chapter, she reminds us of the displacement that characterized her youth and links this aspect of her past with her 51 son’s attitude. When Guy is fourteen, Angelou decides to move to New York. She does not bring Guy to the East until she has found a place for them to live, and when she arrives after a one-month separation, he initially resists her attempts to make new home for them.

About her son, Angelou states:

The air between us [Angelou and Guy] was burdened with his aloof

scorn. I understand him too well. When I was three my parents divorced

in Long Beach, California, and sent me and my four-year-old brother,

unescorted, to our paternal grandmother. We wore wrist tags which

informed anyone concerned that we were Marguerite and Bailey

Johnson, en route to Mrs. Annie Henderson in Stamps, Arkansas. Except

for disastrous and mercifully brief encounters with each of them when

I was seven, we didn’t see our parents again until I was thirteen.

(HW 55)

From this and similar encounters with Guy, Angelou learns that the continual displacement of her own childhood is something she cannot prevent from recurring in her son’s life.

In New York, Angelou begins to work as the Northern coordinator of the

Southern Christian Leadership Conference and devotees most of her time to raising funds, boosting membership, and organizing labor, both in the office and in the neighborhoods. Throughout Heart of a Woman, she expands her own narrative by including anecdotes about well-known entertainers and political figures. Her account of a visit with Martin Luther King, Jr., at her SCLC office is just one example of this autobiographical technique. When Dr. King pays his first visit to the New York office during her tenure, she does not have advance notice of his presence and rushes into her 52 office one day after lunch to find him sitting at her desk. They begin to talk about her background and eventually focus their comments on her brother, Bailey:

Come on, take your seat back and tell me about yourself. . . . when

I mentioned my brother Bailey, he asked what he was doing now. The

question stopped me. He was friendly and understanding, but if I told

him my brother was in prison, I couldn’t be sure how long his

understanding would last. I could lose my job. Even more important,

I might lose his respect. Birds of a feather and all that, but I took a

chance and told him Bailey was in Sing Sing. He dropped his head and

looked at his hands. . . . I understand. Disappointment drives our young

men to some desperate lengths. Sympathy and sadness kept his voice

low. That’s why we must fight and win. We must save the Baileys of the

world. And Maya, never stop loving him. Never give up on him. Never

deny him. And remember, he is freer than those who hold him behind

bars. (HW 69)

Angelou appreciates King’s sympathy and of course shares his hope that their work will make the world more fair and free. She recognizes the undeniable effects of displacement on Bailey’s life and fervently hopes that her own son will spared any further humiliation and rejection.

From time to time, Angelou sees marriage as the answer to her own sense of dislocation and fully envisions a perfect future with various prospective husbands.

While in New York, she meets Vusumzi Make, a black South African freedom fighter, and imagines that he will provide her with the same domestic security she had hoped would develop from other relationships: “I was getting a husband, and a part of that gift was having someone to share responsibility and guilt” (HW 80). Yet her hopes are even 53 more idealistic than usual, in as much as she imagines herself participating in the liberation of South Africa as Vus Make’s wife:

With my courage added to his own, he would succeed in bringing the

ignominious white rule in South Africa to an end. If I didn’t already

have the qualities he needed, then I would just develop them infatuation

made me believe in my ability to create myself into my lover’s desire.

(HW 57)

In reality, Angelou is only willing to go so far in re-creating herself to meet her husband’s desires and is all to go so far in re-creating herself to meet her husband’s desires and is all too soon frustrated with her role as Make’s wife. He does not want her to work but is unable on his own to support his expensive tastes as well as his family.

They are evicted from their New York apartment just before they leave for Egypt and soon face similar problems in Cairo. Their marriage dissolves after some months, despite Angelou’s efforts to contribute to their financial assets by working as editor of the Arab Observer.

In Heart of a Woman, she underscores the illusory nature of her fantasy about marriage to show how her perspective has shifted over the years and how much understanding she has gained about life in general. Recreating these fantasies in her autobiography is a subtle form of truth telling and a way to present hard-earned about her life to her readers. A second type of fantasy in this autobiography is borne out in reality rather than in illusion, as is the case with her expectations of marriage.

One of the most important uses of the second kind of fantasy involves a sequence that demonstrates how much she fears for Guy’s safety throughout his youth.

A few days after mother and son arrive in Accra, where they move when her marriage with Vus Make deteriorates, some friends invite them to a picnic. Although his mother 54 declines, Guy immediately accepts the invitation in a show of independence. On the way home from the day’s outing, her son is seriously injured in an automobile accident.

Eventhough he has had very little experience driving, his intoxicated host asks Guy to drive. When their return is delayed, Angelou is terrified by her recurring fear for Guy’s safety.

Later, in the Korle Bu emergency ward, her familiar fantasy about harm endangering her son’s life moves to the level of reality, as she relates the vulnerability she feels in her role as mother with full responsibility for the well-being of her only child. In a new country, estranged from her husband and with no immediate prospects for employment, she possesses very little control over her life or her son’s safety. After the accident in Ghana, Guy is not only fighting for independence from his mother but also for life itself. The conclusion of Heart of a Woman, nevertheless, announces a new beginning for Angelou and hope for her future relationship with Guy.

The Heart of a Woman opens with several paragraphs of historical reflection intended to locate the autobiographer in time and place. The book covers Maya’s life from 1957 to 1962. At the beginning blacks and whites are enveloped in contradictions.

In the more personal opening sequence of The Heart of Woman, Angelou and her son

Guy are living communally on a houseboat near San Francisco, trying to bridge the gap between black and white and living on the savings she has put away while singing in

California and in Hawaii. Within a year, she and Guy move from the commune to a rented house near San Francisco and, finally, in 1959, they cross the continent to New

York City.

In New York, Angelou, no longer satisfied with singing in nightclubs, dedicates herself to acting, writing, political organizing and her son. She becomes involved with

Martin Luther King’s growing civil-rights organization, the Southern Christian 55

Leadership Conference (SCLC), doing a significant fund-raiser for King and becoming a key organizer in his group. These activities make The Heart of a Woman the “most political segment of Angelou’s autobiographical statement” (Cudjoe 297).

Her activities with SCLC cease shortly after Angelou meets Vusumzi Make, a handsome South African. After a wedding ceremony in London that is never legalized,

Maya, Vus, and Guy move to Egypt. While living in Cairo, Maya discovers that Vus has been buying expensive items of furniture without her knowledge and that he has been unfaithful. After a public display of emotion, Maya leaves with Guy for West

Africa, hoping that she might set up residence in Liberia. But en route, in Ghana, Guy is injured in a car accident.

In this autobiography Angelou performs in a more mature manner both as a mother and a professional. Here it signals Angelou’s maturity. She becomes more certain in her mothering, now that Guy is an adolescent. She promises herself to give up major tours, and finds fulfilment in her New York/ Brooklyn environment – as an actress, a writer and a political organizer. Angelou’s professional activities are interrupted when in 1961 she meets a South African, Vusumzi Make. At Vus’s insistence they pretend they are married. The new husband goes to Cairo; Maya and

Guy soon join him. The so-called marriage goes poorly, mainly because of money problems and Vus’s promiscuity. The volume ends with Angelou and Vus discovered and with mother and son en route to Liberia when Guy is seriously injured in a car accident.

Angelou's fourth autobiography The Heart of a Woman opened with Angelou and her son Guy living in an experimental commune with whites, in an attempt to participate in the new openness between Blacks and whites. She was not completely comfortable with the arrangement, however; Angelou never named her roommates. For 56 the most part, Angelou was able to freely interact with whites in this book, but she occasionally encountered prejudice similar to earlier episodes, like when she required the assistance of white friends to rent a home in a segregated neighbourhood. Angelou had come "a long way" from her interactions with whites and people of other races.

Angelou continued, however, her indictment of white power structure and her protests against racial injustice that had been a theme throughout all her books. Instead of offering solutions, however, she simply reported on, reacted to, and dramatized events.

Angelou became more "politicized" in The Heart of Woman, and developed a new sense of Black identity. Angelou's decision to leave show business was political, and regarded this book as "a social and cultural history of Black Americans" during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Angelou saw herself as a historian of both the Civil Rights movement and the Black literary movement of the time. She became more attracted to the causes of Black militants, both in the U.S. and in Africa, to the point of entering into a relationship with South African freedom fighter Vusumzi Make, and became more committed to activism. She became an active political protestor during this period, but she did not think of herself in that way. Instead, the focus was on herself, and she used the autobiographical form to demonstrate how the Civil Rights movement influenced one person involved in it. Her contributions to civil rights as a fundraiser and SCLC organizer were successful and effective.

Her most recent autobiography, All God’s Children Need Traveling

Shoes(1986), has swept Angelou to new heights of critical and popular acclaim. Her life story resumes exactly where it ended chronologically and geographically in The

Heart of a Woman, with Guy’s recovery from his autobiographical narrative occur in

Africa, her latest addition to the series takes place almost exclusively in Ghana. In All

God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes,however, Angelou focuses primarily on the story 57 of her and many other black Americans’ attempts in the early 1960s to return to the ancestral home in Africa. As in her four previous autobiographies, she explores the theme of displacement and the difficulties in creating a home for oneself, one’s family, and one’s people.

In choosing to live in Ghana following the deterioration of her marriage to Vus

Make, Angelou hopes to find a place where she and her son can make a home for themselves, free at last from the racial bigotry she has faced throughout the United

States, Europe and parts of the Middle East. While Guy is recuperating from his injuries, she carefully evaluates her assets and concludes that since his birth, her only home has been wherever she and her son are together. Her initial expectations, therefore: for feeling at ease and settling down in West Africa are, understandably, considerable: “We had come, and if home was not what we had expected, never mind, our need for belonging allowed us to ignore the obvious and to create real places or even illusory places, befitting our imagination” (GT 43). Unfortunately, the Ghanian people do not readily accept Angelou, her son, and most of the black American community in Accra, and they unexpectedly find themselves isolated and often ignored.

Taken as a whole, All God’s Children Need Travelling Shoes recounts the sequence of events that gradually brings the autobiographer closer to an understanding and eventually to an acceptance of the seemingly unbreachable distance between

Ghanians and the black American expatriates. Within the first few weeks of her stay in

Ghana, Angelou suspects that she has mistakenly followed the misdirected footsteps of other black Americans who “had come home, but had left one familiar place of painful memory for another strange place with none” (Lupton 58).

In time, she understands that their alienation is most likely based on the fact that they, unlike the Ghanians, are the descendants of African slaves, who painfully bear the 58 knowledge that “ not all slaves were stolen, nor were all slave dealers European” (Kent

73). No one in the expatriate group can feel fully at ease in Africa as long as they carry the haunting suspicion that “African slavery stemmed mostly from tribal exploitation and not solely from European colonial imperialism” (Lionnet 139).

Angelou, nevertheless, perseveres; she eventually settles into lasting friendships with both Americans and Africans and finds work through her talents as a journalist and a performer. With her professional and personal contacts, she meets many African political activists, as well as diplomats and artists from around the world. These acquaintances, in addition to a brief tour in Berlin and Venice with the original St.

Mark’s Playhouse Company of Genet’s The Blacks, enlarge Angelou’s perspective on racial complexities and help her locate a place in Africa where she can live, albeit temporarily at peace.

In an interview with Nebauer asking her how far the fifth volume go? Angelou states:

Actually, it’s a new kind. It’s really quite a new voice. I’m looking at the

black American resident, me and the other black American residents in

Ghana, and trying to see all magic of the eternal quest of human beings

to go home again. That is maybe what life is anyway, to return to the

Creator. All of thatnaivete, the innocence of trying to. That awful

rowing towards God, whatever it is. Whether it’s to return to your

village or the lover you lost or the youth that some people return to or

the beauty that some want to return to. Writing autobiography frequently

involves this quest to return to the past, to the home. Sometimes, if the

home can’t be found, if it can’t be located again, then that home or that

love or that family, whatever has been lost, is recreated or invented. Yes 59

of course. That’s it! That’s what I’m seeing in this trek back to Africa.

That is so many cases that idealized home of course is non-existent. In

so many cases some black Americans created it on the spot. On the spot.

And I did too. Created something, looked, seemed like what we have

idealized very far from reality. (123)

Whatever vision of home Angelou creates for herself and her son in Ghana, she discovers a heightened sense of self-awareness and independence. By the end of her stay in West Africa, she has a renewed image of herself as woman, lover, mother, writer, performer and political activist. In her state of fortified strength, she decides to leave Africa and return to the country of her birth, however disturbing the memories of slavery and the reality of racial hatred.

In fact, Angelou ends her sojourn in foreign lands to commit herself to Malcolm

X’s struggle for racial equality and social justice in the United States, by planning to work as an office coordinator for the organization of Afro-American Unity. She has finally freed herself from the illusion of claiming an ancestral home in Africa.

Ironically perhaps, with the writing of All God’s Children Need Travelling Shoesand the brilliant clarity of the autobiographical present, this trek back to Africa, Maya

Angelou also decides to return to the South, and for the first time since her youth, make her home there. Although she has learned that the idealized home of course is non- existent. She leaves her readers to suspect that her traveling shoes are never really out of sight; if nothing else, we will soon find ourselves following her paths of autobiographical discovery once again.

The fifth volume of Maya Angelou’s autobiography All God’s Children Need

Travelling Shoes (1986) 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 60 praise and disappointment. Eugenia Collier, on the hand, proclaimed the book to be the apex toward which the other autobiographies have pointed. The most important story found in this autobiography is Angelou’s love for her son. The volume begins with a reiteration of Guy’s car accident; the episode 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 exploration 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 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.

Maya states:

Guy was seventeen and I was thirty-three and determined. We were

Black Americans in West Africa, where for the first time in our lives the

colour of our skin was accepted as correct and normal. . . . I had worked

successfully as a journalist in Cairo, and failed sadly at a marriage which

I ended with false public dignity and copious secret tears. But with all

crying in the past, I was on my way to another adventure. The future

was plump with promise. (AG 3)

The plot of this autobiography begins in Ghana and terminates with Angelou’s decision to return to America, thus ending both the series and the journey. She leaves for conscious reasons involving her heritage, her craft and her private life, especially as it 61 relates to her son. Angelou’s autobiographies receive their shape form personal and cultural referents rather than from the necessities of plot, as in mystery novels or spy fiction. The narrator, now thirty-three, relates the horrifying event of Guy’s car accident that results in a broken arm, leg and neck.

Admittedly, Guy lived with the knowledge that an unexpected and very

hard sneeze could force the fractured vertebrae against his spinal cord,

and he would be paralyzed or die immediately, but he had only and

infatuation with life. He hadn’t lived long enough to fall in love with

this brutally delicious experience. . . . He could die if he wanted to and

go off to wherever dead folks go, but I, I would be left without a home.

(AG 5)

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 centre of her activities. She forms new friendships with her roommates, African poets, African American writers and artists 62 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.

She described the nameless orphans of Africa who had been shunted around the world. Some remained on the continent, out of fortune or perfidy. Their countries had been exploited and their cultures had been discredited by colonialism. Nonetheless, they could reflect through their priests and chiefs on centuries of continuity. The lowliest could call the name of the ancestors who lived centuries earlier. The land upon which they lived had been in their people’s possession beyond remembered time.

Despite political bondage and economic exploitation, they had retained an incredible innocence. About these people, Maya states:

I doubted if I, or any Black from the diaspora, could really return to

Africa. We wore skeletons of old despair like necklaces, heralding our

arrival, and were branded with cynicism. In America we danced,

laughed, procreated; we became lawyers, judges, legislators, teachers,

doctors, and preachers, but as always, under our glorious costumes we

carried the badge of a barbarous history sewn to our dark skins. It had

often been said that Black people were childish, but in America we had

matured without ever experiencing the true abandon of adolescence.

(AG 76)

These intimate racial, political and sacred connections with Africans allow Angelou to recognize but not 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. In Ghana, Angelou was to some degree and quite 63 reasonably so caught up in a vision of Africa similar to what a generation of black

Americans experienced at home in the 1960’s: identification with the Pan African

Movement and with West African hair styles, clothing, language, music and other manifestations of African culture.

In Traveling Shoesshe embraced these styles, hair and dress in particular. In one revealing episode, Angelou is at first horrified when her beautician, Comfort Adday, styles her hair into ugly strands like the ‘pickaninnies’ in old photos. Comfort, apparently amused, goes on to reshape, tighten, and cut Angelou’s hair so that by the end of the session her customer looks just like a Ghanian. Angelou self-consciously recalls this moment, knowing that to ‘look like’ a Ghanian meant only a cosmetic transformation and not a genuine assimilation into West African attitudes and traditions. It seems that here and in other episodes of the autobiography, the contradictions of race, culture and nationality are too strong to disappear and too fragile to preserve.

Angelou's exploration of her African and African-American identities" was an important theme in her fifth autobiography All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes.

The alliances and relationships with those she met in Ghana contributed to Angelou's identity and growth. Her experiences as an expatriate helped her come to terms with her personal and historical past, and by the end of the book she was ready to return to

America with a deeper understanding of both the African and American parts of her character. McPherson called Angelou's parallels and connections between Africa and

America her "double-consciousness", which contribute to her understanding of herself.

In Traveling Shoes, Angelou was able to recognize similarities between African and

African-American culture; as Lupton put it, the "blue songs, shouts, and gospels" she has grown up with in America "echo the rhythms of West Africa". Angelou recognized 64 the connections between African and American Black cultures, including the children's games, the folklore, the spoken and non-verbal languages, the food, sensibilities, and behaviour. She connected the behavior of many African mother figures, especially their generosity, with her grandmother's actions.

In one of the most significant sections of Traveling Shoes, Angelou recounted an encounter with a West African woman who recognized her, on the basis of her appearance, as a member of the Bambara group of West Africa. These and other experiences in Ghana demonstrated Angelou's maturity, as a mother able to let go of her adult son, as a woman no longer dependent upon a man, and as an American able to

"perceive the roots of her identity" and how they affected her personality.

The ambivalent conclusion of Traveling Shoes involves her departure not only from Ghana but from Guy as well. Her journey in Africa over, she waits at the Accra airport for the plane to return her to America. Angelou suggests that her awaited voyage from Africa to America is an ironic echo of the voyage long ago, when West

African slaves were chained and wrenched from their homeland and families. She parallels her departure from Africa with her departure from Guy, the emotional center of her autobiographies, the son who in Singin and Swingin and Getting Merry like

Christmas she left in America with his grandmother so that she could tour Europe with

Porgy and Bess. She leaves Guy in Africa as she prepares to return to America.

The reversals at the end of this autobiography suggest the apparent end of

Angelou’s mother son relationship. Guy stands apart from her, surrounded by his

African friends. In this, her last depiction of Guy in the narratives, Angelou’s roots him in the culture of Ghana, thus returning him to the place of his ancestors. He is magically transformed from uncooperative son to newly born American African, free to 65 continue his education at the University of Ghana while she is free to explore her potential as performer, poet, spokesperson and autobiographer.

The themes encompassing Maya Angelou’s autobiographies include racism, identity, family, and travel. Beginning with Caged Bird and ending with her final autobiography, Angelou used the metaphor of a bird, which represented Angelou's confinement resulting from racism and oppression, struggling to escape its cage.

Angelou's autobiographies can be placed in the African- American literature tradition of political protest. Their unity underscored one of Angelou's central themes: the injustice of racism and how to fight it. According to scholar

In the course of her autobiographies, her views about Black-white relationships changed and she learned to accept different points of view. Angelou's theme of identity was established from the beginning of her autobiographies, with the opening lines in

Caged Bird, and like other female writers in the late 1960s and early 1970s, she used the autobiography to reimagine ways of writing about women's lives and identities in a male-dominated society. Her original goal was to write about the lives of Black women in America, but it evolved in her later volumes to document the ups and downs of her life.

She is best known for her first autobiography, the critically acclaimed I Know

Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), which was nominated for a National Book Award.

Angelou did not write Caged Bird with the intention of writing a series of autobiographies; critics have "judged the subsequent autobiographies in light of the first". Angelou's autobiographies have been characterized as autobiographical fiction.

Some critics state that they conform to the genre's standard structure: they are written by a single author, they are chronological, and they contain elements of character, technique, and theme. 66

Like elements within a prison narrative, the caged bird represented Angelou's confinement resulting from racism and oppression. This metaphor also invoked the

"supposed contradiction of the bird singing in the midst of its struggle". Angelou's witness of the evil in her society, as directed towards Black women, shaped Angelou's young life and informed her views into adulthood. Her autobiographies and lectures, which some called "ranging in tone from warmly humorous to bitterly satiric", have gained a respectful and enthusiastic response from the general public and critics.

Angelou explained and illuminated the condition of African Americans, but without alienating her readers. Angelou promoted the importance of hard work, a common theme in slave narratives, throughout all her autobiographies, in order to break the

African-American stereotype of laziness. Her description of the strong and cohesive

Black community of Stamps demonstrated how African Americans have subverted repressive institutions to withstand racism. Angelou evolved from wishing that she could become white in Caged Bird to later shedding her self-loathing and embracing a strong racial identity.

Also in Traveling Shoes, Angelou came to terms with her difficult past, both as a descendent of Africans taken forcibly to America as slaves and as an African

American who had experienced racism. As she told an interviewer, she brought her son to Ghana to protect him from the negative effects of racism because she did not think he had the tools to withstand them.For the first time in Angelou's life, she did not "feel threatened by racial hate"in Ghana. The theme of racism was still an important theme in

Traveling Shoes, but she has matured in the way she dealt with it.

Angelou was "not yet ready to toss off the stings of prejudice, but tolerance and even a certain understanding can be glimpsed". This was demonstrated in Angelou's treatment of the "genocidal involvement of Africans in slave-trading", something that 67 has often been overlooked or misrepresented by other Black writers. Angelou was taught an important lesson about combating racism by Malcolm X, who compared it to a mountain in which everyone's efforts was needed to overcome it.

Angelou learned about herself and about racism throughout Traveling Shoes, even during her brief tour of Venice and Berlin for the revival of The Blacks, the play by Jean Genet that Angelou had originally performed in 1961. She revived her passion for African-American culture while associating with other African Americans for the first time since moving to Ghana. She compared her experiences of American racism with Germany's history of racial prejudice and military aggression.

The verbal violence of the folk tales shared during her luncheon with her

German hosts and Israeli friend was as significant to Angelou as physical violence, to the point that she became ill. Angelou's first-hand experience with fascism, as well as the racist sensibilities of the German family she visited, "help[ed] shape and broaden her constantly changing vision" regarding racial prejudice.

The theme of identity was established from the beginning of Angelou's series of autobiographies, with the opening lines in Caged Bird, which "foretell Angelou’s autobiographical project: to write the story of the developing black female subject by sharing the tale of one Southern Black girl’s becoming". Angelou and other female writers in the late 1960s and early 1970s used the autobiography to reimagine ways of writing about women's lives and identities in a male-dominated society.

Feminist scholar Maria Lauret has made a connection between Angelou's autobiographies to writers such as Marilyn French and Doris Lessing written during the same period. Both genres employed the narrator as protagonist and used "the illusion of presence in their mode of signification". Angelou broke stereotypes of African-

American women by describing these images and stereotypes, and then disproving 68 them, which set the stage for Angelou's identity development in her later autobiographies.

Angelou, as a woman, demonstrated the formation of her own cultural identity throughout her narratives. Angelou presented herself as a role model for African-

American women by reconstructing the Black woman's image throughout her autobiographies, and has used her many roles, incarnations, and identities to connect the layers of oppression with her personal history. Angelou's themes of the individual's strength and ability to overcome appeared throughout Angelou's autobiographies as well.

The women Angelou presented in her autobiographies, especially Caged Bird, influenced the woman Angelou became. The three characters in Caged Bird, Angelou's mother Vivian, her grandmother Annie Henderson, and Mrs. Flowers (who helps

Angelou find her voice again after her rape), collaborated to "form a triad which serves as the critical matrix in which the child is nurtured and sustained during her journey through Southern Black girlhood".

Angelou's original goal was to write about the lives of Black women in

America, but her goal evolved in her later volumes to document the ups and downs of her own life. Angelou's autobiographies had the same structure: a historical overview of the places she was living in at the time and how she coped within the context of a larger white society, as well as the ways that her story played out within that context. Angelou in her autobiography, successfully demonstrated the integrity of the African American character as she experienced more positive interactions with whites. Angelou was concerned with what it meant to be a Black female in the U.S., but she focused upon herself at a certain point in history. 69

The theme of family and family relationships, from the character-defining experience of Angelou's parents' abandonment in Caged Bird to her relationships with her son, husbands, friends, and lovers are important in all of her books. As in American autobiography generally and in African-American autobiography specifically, which has its roots in the slave narrative, travel is another important theme in Angelou's autobiographies. Angelou's autobiographies take place all over the world, from

Arkansas to Africa and back to the US, and span almost forty years, beginning from the start of World War II to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

Angelou's description of close familial relationships, such as her relationships with her parents and son was the only unifying theme that connected all of her autobiographies. Angelou's concept of family was affected by Maya and Bailey's displacement at the beginning of Caged Bird. Motherhood was a theme that connected all of Angelou's autobiographies, specifically her experiences as a single mother, a daughter, and a granddaughter.

Although Angelou's grandmother died early in the series, Angelou quoted her many times throughout the series. Angelou's desire for security for Guy drove her to marry Tosh Angelos in Singin' and Swingin', and drove many of her decisions, job choices, and romantic relationships. Due to Angelou's race and economic background, her experience of motherhood is inseparably intertwined with work. Angelou's long list of occupations attested to the challenges, especially in her second autobiography

Gather Together in My Name, she faced as a working teenager mother, which often led

Angelou to questionable decisions.

Black women autobiographers like Angelou have debunked the stereotypes of

African-American mothers of "breeder and matriarch" and have presented them as having more creative and satisfying roles. Angelou's autobiographies presented Black 70 women differently from their literary portrayals up to that time. No Black woman in the world of Angelou's books are losers, and that Angelou was the third generation of intelligent and resourceful women who overcame the obstacles of racism and oppression.

Angelou depicted women, in an era of cultural transition, and that her books described one Black woman's attempts to create and maintain a healthy self-esteem.

Angelou's experiences as a working-class single mother challenged traditional and

Western viewpoints of women and family life, including the nuclear family structure.

Angelou described societal forces that eventually expanded to the white family, and that Angelou's strategies of economic survival and experiences of family structure enabled Black families to survive economically.

Travel is a common theme in American autobiography as a whole. It is something of a national myth to Americans as a people. This was also the case for

African-American autobiography, which was rooted in and developed out of the slave narrative. Like those narratives that focused on the writers' search for freedom from bondage, modern African-American autobiographers like Angelou sought to develop

"an authentic self" and the freedom to find it in their community. Many critics called the travel motif in Angelou's autobiographies "fluidity". This fluidity began in Caged

Bird and was a metaphor for her psychological movements and growth caused by her displacement and trauma throughout the book, something Angelou had to escape in order to transcend it. Angelou structured Caged Bird into three parts: arrival, sojourn, and departure, with both geographic and psychological aspects.

The journey to a distant goal, the return home, and the quest which involves the voyage out, achievement, and return are typical patterns in Black autobiography. For

Angelou, this quest took her from her childhood and adolescence, as described in her 71 first two books, into the adult world. The setting in Angelou's first two autobiographies was limited to three places (Arkansas, Missouri, and California), but the setting breaks open in Singin’andSwingin’and Getting’ Merry Like Christmas to include Europe as she travelled with her Porgy and Bess company. The sunny tour of Angelou's twenties from early years marked by disappointments and humiliation, into the broader world— to the white world and to the international community. This period described years of joy as well as the start of Angelou's great success and fulfillment as an entertainer.

Angelou's travel narrative in Singin' and Swingin', which took up approximately

40 percent of the book, gave the book its organized structure. Angelou's observations about race, gender, and class made the book more than a simple travel narrative. As a

Black American, her travels around the world put her in contact with many nationalities and classes, expanded her experiences beyond her familiar circle of community and family, and complicated her understandings of race relations.

Angelou continued to expand the settings of her autobiographies in her subsequent volumes. The Heart of a Woman had three primary settings—the San

Francisco Bay Area, New York, and Egypt—and two secondary ones—London and

Accra. Like all of Angelou's books, the structure of The Heart of a Woman was based upon a journey. Angelou emphasized the theme of movement by opening the book with a spiritual stating that ancient spiritual could have been the theme song of the United

States in 1957. This spiritual, which contained a reference to Noah’s ark, presented

Angelou as a type of Noah and demonstrated her spirituality.

As a writer, Angelou not only related her own journey of an African-American woman searching for a home, but the journeys of other Black expatriates at the time.

Angelou's issues were resolved at the end of Traveling Shoes when she decided to return to America. She called her departure a second leave-taking, and compared it to 72 the last time she left her son with his grandmother in when he was a child, and to the forced departure from Africa by her ancestors. As Lupton states, "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". Even though Angelou's final autobiography A

Song Flung Up to Heaven took place in her home country, the travel motif continued.

Maya Angelou is perhaps right to claim that she is the only serious writer who has chosen the autobiographical form to carry her work, her expression. She has been duly recognized as being one of the most successful serial writers of black autobiography. In her five autobiographies and also in her poetry, she dramatizes both the pleasure and plight of a young black female in America’s socially segregated society.

Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood. Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas and a grandmother who had the local store. Displaced they were and if growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat. But alternating with all the pain and terror, her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis with her mother and humiliation and fear.

The sequential books written by Angelou tell not just what happened to her but the effect upon her of these happenings. She relates things she has learned, how she has grown, and how she has moved along the trail of self-discovery. Her stories seem to tell themselves and from them emerge the exposition of her themes. Angelou’s dedication 73 to personal growth and self-evaluation comes up repeatedly and she continually modifies her ideas about black/white relationships over time. Despite early environmental conditioning, she eventually realizes, as did her friend Malcolm X. that not all whites are devils. Three familiar themes of black autobiography are found in both Angelou’s prose and poetry: repeated triumphs over obstacles, a search for identity and the value of literacy and learning.

She examines her childhood and responds to the problems of that childhood by creating a persona. She has said she invented herself because she was tired of society inventing her, of distorting her personality, of turning a stereotype into reality, of bestowing upon her a label she rejected. The biographical facts of Angelou’s life in

Stamps, Arkansas, in the 1930 where she lived from the age of thirteen with

Grandmother “Momma” Henderson after the divorce of her parents, are interwoven with many accounts about her life in her autobiographies.

Thus her autobiographies are aptly called “testimonials”. She testifies not only for herself but also for her community. She seems to speak for black consciousness.

Her voice as a writer is the voice of her people. What her community endures, she endures.She writes about what she knows: the black experience. The universals contained in her work serve to underscore her frequently expressed thesis: that as people, we are more alike than unlike. Her autobiographies illustrate the life of black woman, as Angelou had also shared the similar experience in her life. Thus Angelou, through her autobiographies glorifies the spiritual, emotional and intellectual powers of black women and the feelings of Africa’s beauty, strength and dignity. Chapter III

Sufferings and Survival: A Study of Maya Angelo’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Gather Together in My Name and Singin’ and Swingin’ and Getting’ Merry Like Christmas

Autobiography and autobiographical or confessional novel offer a unique conflation of history and discourse, of verifiable fact and aesthetic fabulation. To a large extent, every biography imposes narrative form on an otherwise formless and fragmented personal history. Every confessional or otherwise, incorporates shards of individual and social history into the baroque texture of its ostensibly mimetic world.

Such autobiographical novels provide a new understanding of the lives of women of colour who have been marginalized in contemporary American culture.

It is through such autobiographies, women writers tend to create the personal space necessary to conquer and transcend prevalent stereotypes of gender, race and class that limit expectations and circumscribe future possibilities. In particular, it does show how sex-role enculturation affect personal and artistic growth in a world that tacitly oppresses both the minority artist and the autonomous female creator. The form of autobiography is or at least has the potential to be, a revolutionary form of writing.

As such, it lends itself particularly well to the evolution of an enabling feminist discourse rooted in a diversity of ethnic back grounds.

As a genre, autobiography has always encouraged the author/narrator to reassess his or her past and to interpret a plethora of racial, sexual and cultural codes inscribed on personal consciousness. It is no wonder, then, that minority women authors have reacted to the impetus of the second wave of feminism in the 1960s: they have appropriated the autobiographical act as a potential tool for liberation. Women’s life-writing, cast in the form of memoir or confessional narrative, promises mastery 75 over a fluid, shapeless, episodic history. Whether relating an individual life-history or transforming experience through fictive fabulation, the author can reinscribe an alienated and marginal self into the pliable body of a protean text.

An epiphany or conversion experience often takes shape as compensatory fantasy. Then a new, revised self, emerging as autobiographical or fictional protagonist, is free to rebel against the values of the dominant culture. Through the autobiographical act, a female persona creates herself a new and calls herself into being as the protagonist of a fabulated history. Women’s life writing can emerge in a variety of experimental texts. These may range from historical diary and memoir to the

Bildungsroman whose protagonist clearly shares its author’s own youthful trajectory.

The Afro-American autobiographical statement is the most Afro-American of all Afro-American literary pursuits. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, thousands of autobiographies of Afro-American slaves appeared expressing their sentiments about slavery, the most cruel of American institutions. The practice of the autobiographical statement, up until the contemporary era, remains the quintessential literary genre for capturing the cadences of the Afro-American being, revealing its deepest aspirations and tracing the evolution of the Afro-American psyche under the impact of slavery and modern U.S. imperialism.

There is nothing in the autobiographical statement that makes it essentially different from fiction except, of course, that which has been erected by convention.

Michael Ryan, picking up on the observations of Jacques Derrida, has argued that inherent in the structure of the autobiographical statement is the necessary death of the author as a condition for the existence of the referential machinery. “The writing,” he states, “must be capable, from the outset, of functioning independently of the subject, of being repeated in the absence of the subject, of being repeated in the absence of the 76 subject. Strictly speaking, then its referent is always “ideal” of fictional – produced and sustained by convention” (Lupton 29).

To the degree, however, that the referent is present in the autobiography (it being absent or “ideal” in fiction), there is really nothing in the autobiography that guarantees that it will not be read as fiction or vice versa. In fact, any discussion on the

Afro-American autobiography is always likely to raise this question: “is it really true?” and almost always the author must present strong evidence that the work is unquestionably autobiographical. Autobiography and fiction, then, are simply different means of arriving at, or (re)cognizing the same truth: the reality of American life and the position of the Afro-American subject in that life. Neither of the genres should be given a privileged position in our literary history and each should be judged on its ability to speak honestly and perceptively about Black experience in this land.

Maya Angelou is a poet and award-winning author known for her acclaimed memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and her numerous poetry and essay collections. Born on April 4, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri, writer and civil rights activist

Maya Angelou is known for her 1969 memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which made literary history as the first nonfiction best-seller by an African-American woman. In 1971, Angelou published the Pulitzer Prize-nominated poetry collection Just

Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'Fore I Die. She later wrote the poem "On the Pulse of

Morning"—one of her most famous works—which she recited at President Bill

Clinton's inauguration in 1993. Angelou has received several honours throughout her career, including two NAACP Image Awards in the outstanding literary work

(nonfiction) category, in 2005 and 2009.

Multi-talented barely seems to cover the depth and breadth of Maya Angelou's accomplishments. She is an author, actress, screenwriter, dancer and poet. Born 77

Marguerite Annie Johnson, Angelou had a difficult childhood. Her parents split up when she was very young, and she and her older brother, Bailey, were sent to live with their father's mother, Anne Henderson, in Stamps, Arkansas.

As an African American, Angelou experienced first hand racial prejudices and discrimination in Arkansas. She also suffered at the hands of a family associate around the age of 7. During a visit with her mother, Angelou was raped by her mother's boyfriend. Then, as vengeance for the sexual assault, Angelou's uncles killed the boyfriend. So traumatized by the experience, Angelou stopped talking. She returned to

Arkansas and spent years as a virtual mute.

During World War II, Angelou moved to San Francisco, California, where she won a scholarship to study dance and acting at the California Labour School. Also during this time, Angelou became the first black female cable car conductor—a job she held only briefly, in San Francisco. In 1944, a 16-year-old Angelou gave birth to a son,

Guy (a short-lived high school relationship had led to the pregnancy), thereafter working a number of jobs to support herself and her child. In 1952, the future literary icon wed Anastasios Angelopulos, a Greek sailor from whom she took her professional name—a blend of her childhood nickname, "Maya," and a shortened version of his surname.

In the mid-1950s, Angelou's career as a performer began to take off. She landed a role in a touring production of Porgy and Bess, later appearing in the off-Broadway production Calypso Heat Wave (1957) and releasing her first album Miss Calypso

(1957). A member of the Harlem Writers Guild and a civil rights activist, Angelou organized and starred in the musical revue Cabaret for Freedom as a benefit for the

Southern Christian Leadership Conference, also serving as the SCLC's northern coordinator. 78

In 1961, Angelou appeared in an off-Broadway production of Jean Genet's The

Blacks with James Earl Jones, Lou Gossett Jr. and Cicely Tyson. While the play earned strong reviews, Angelou moved on to other pursuits, spending much of the 1960s abroad; she first lived in Egypt and then in Ghana, working as an editor and a freelance writer. Angelou also held a position at the University of Ghana for a time.

After returning to the United States, Angelou was urged by friend and fellow writer James Baldwin to write about her life experiences. Her efforts resulted in the enormously successful 1969 memoir about her childhood and young adult years, I

Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which made literary history as the first nonfiction best-seller by an African-American woman. The poignant work also made Angelou an international star.

Since publishing Caged Bird, Angelou has continued to break new ground—not just artistically, but educationally and socially. She wrote the drama Georgia, Georgia in 1972—becoming the first African-American woman to have her screenplay produced—and went on to earn a Tony Award nomination for her role in the play Look

Away (1973) and an Emmy Award nomination for her work on the television miniseries

Roots (1977), among other honours.

Angelou has written several autobiographies throughout her career, including

All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986) and A Song Flung Up to Heaven

(2002), but 1969's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings continues to be regarded as her most popular autobiographical work. She has also published several collections of poetry, including Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'Fore I Die (1971), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

One of Angelou's most famous works is the poem "On the Pulse of Morning," which she wrote especially for and recited at President Bill Clinton's inaugural 79 ceremony in January 1993—marking the first inaugural recitation since 1961, when

Robert Frost delivered his poem "The Gift Outright" at President John F. Kennedy's inauguration. Angelou went on to win a Grammy Award (best spoken word album) for the audio version of the poem. In 1995, Angelou was lauded for remaining on The New

York Times' paperback nonfiction best-seller list for two years—the longest-running record in the chart's history.

Seeking new creative challenges, Angelou made her directorial debut in 1998 with Down in the Delta, starring Alfre Woodard. She has also written a number of inspirational works, from the essay collection Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey

Now (1994) to her advice for young women in Letter to My Daughter (2008). Interested in health, Angelou has even published cookbooks, including Hallelujah! The Welcome

Table: A Lifetime of Memories with Recipes (2005) and Great Food, All Day Long

(2010).

Angelou's career has seen numerous accolades, including the Chicago

International Film Festival's 1998 Audience Choice Award and a nod from the

Acapulco Black Film Festival in 1999 for Down in the Delta; and two NAACP Image

Awards in the outstanding literary work (nonfiction) category, for her 2005 cookbook and 2008's Letter to My Daughter. Martin Luther King Jr., a close friend of Angelou's, was assassinated on her birthday (April 4) in 1968. Angelou stopped celebrating her birthday for years afterward, and sent flowers to King's widow, Coretta Scott King, for more than 30 years, until Coretta's death in 2006.

Angelou was good friends with TV personality Oprah Winfrey, who has organized several birthday celebrations for the award-winning author, including a week-long cruise for her 70th birthday in 1998.After experiencing health issues for a number of years, Maya Angelou died on May 28, 2014, at her home in Winston-Salem, 80

North Carolina. The news of her passing spread quickly with many people taking to social media to mourn and remember Angelou. Singer Mary J. Blige and politician

Cory Booker were among those who tweeted their favourite quotes by her in tribute.

President Barack Obama also issued a statement about Angelou, calling her "a brilliant writer, a fierce friend, and a truly phenomenal woman." Angelou "had the ability to remind us that we are all God's children; that we all have something to offer," he wrote.

“The Black Female” writes Maya Angelou, “is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time that she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power” (Cudjoe

66). To be black and female in the United States is to be doubly marginal, twice removed from the dominant power group and handicapped by a burden of racial prejudice and gender stereotypes. It is little wonder that, in the persona of her younger self, Marguerite Johnson. Fed on celluloid fantasies of Shirley Temple as female figura, the ingenuous Rite harboured extravagant dreams of physical transformation and found herself unable to relate to a dark, ungainly body with sludge-coloured skin and nappy hair. Beneath this outer shell there surely resided a slim, white-skinned, blue-eyed, blond-haired sylph.

In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou describes her coming of age as a precocious but insecure black girl in the American South during the 1930s and subsequently in California during the 1940s. Maya’s parents’ divorced when she was only three years old and hence Maya and her older brother, Bailey, had to live with their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson, in rural Stamps, Arkansas. Annie, whom they call Momma, runs the only store in the black section of Stamps and becomes the central moral figure in Maya’s childhood. 81

As young children, Maya and Bailey struggle with the pain of having been rejected and abandoned by their parents. Maya also finds herself tormented by the belief that she is an ugly child who will never measure up to genteel, white girls. She does not feel equal to other black children. One Easter Sunday, Maya is unable to finish reciting a poem in church, and self-consciously feeling ridiculed and a failure, Maya races from the church crying, laughing, and wetting herself. Bailey sticks up for Maya when people actually make fun of her to her face, wielding his charisma to put others in their place.

Growing up in Stamps, Maya faces a deep-seated southern racism manifested in wearying daily indignities and terrifying lynch mobs. She spends time at Momma’s store, observing the cotton-pickers as they journey to and from work in the fields.

When Maya is eight, her father, of whom she has no memory, arrives in Stamps unexpectedly and takes her and Bailey to live with their mother, Vivian, in St. Louis,

Missouri. Beautiful and alluring, Vivian lives a wild life working in gambling parlours.

One morning Vivian’s live-in boyfriend, Mr. Freeman, sexually molests Maya, and he later rapes her. They go to court and afterward Mr. Freeman is violently murdered, probably by some the underground criminal associates of Maya’s family.

In the aftermath of these events, Maya endures the guilt and shame of having been sexually abused. She also believes that she bears responsibility for Mr. Freeman’s death because she denied in court that he had molested her prior to the rape. Believing that she has become a mouthpiece for the devil, Maya stops speaking to everyone except Bailey. Her mother’s family accepts her silence at first as temporary post-rape trauma, but they later become frustrated and angry at what they perceive to be disrespectful behaviour. 82

To Maya’s relief, but Bailey’s regret, Maya and Bailey return to Stamps to live with Momma. Momma manages to break through Maya’s silence by introducing her to

Mrs. Bertha Flowers, a kind, educated woman who tells Maya to read works of literature out loud, giving her books of poetry that help her to regain her voice. During these years in Stamps, Maya becomes aware of both the fragility and the strength of her community. She attends a church revival during which a priest preaches implicitly against white hypocrisy through his sermon on charity. The spiritual strength gained during the sermon soon dissipates as the revival crowd walks home past the honky-tonk party. Maya also observes the entire community listening to the Joe Louis heavyweight championship boxing match, desperately longing for him to defend his title against his white opponent.

Maya endures several appalling incidents that teach her about the insidious nature of racism. At age ten, Maya takes a job for a white woman who calls Maya

“Mary” for her own convenience. Maya becomes enraged and retaliates by breaking the woman’s fine china. At Maya’s eighth grade graduation, a white speaker devastates the proud community by explaining that black students are expected to become only athletes or servants. When Maya gets a rotten tooth, Momma takes her to the only dentist in Stamps, a white man who insults her, saying he’d rather place his hand in a dog’s mouth than in hers. The last straw comes when Bailey encounters a dead, rotting black man and witnesses a white man’s satisfaction at seeing the body. Momma begins to fear for the children’s well-being and saves money to bring them to Vivian, who now lives in California.

When Maya is thirteen, the family moves to live with Vivian in Los Angeles and then in Oakland, California. When Vivian marries Daddy Clidell, a positive father figure, they move with him to San Francisco, the first city where Maya feels at home. 83

She spends one summer with her father, Big Bailey, in Los Angeles and has to put up with his cruel indifference and his hostile girlfriend, Dolores. After Dolores cuts her in a fight, Maya runs away and lives for a month with a group of homeless teenagers in a junkyard. She returns to San Francisco strong and self-assured. She defies racist hiring policies in wartime San Francisco to become the first black streetcar conductor at age fifteen. At sixteen, she hides her pregnancy from her mother and stepfather for eight months and graduates from high school. The account ends as Maya begins to feel confident as a mother to her newborn son.

Maya imagines that though people judge her unfairly by her awkward looks, they will be surprised one day when her true self emerges. At the time, she hopes that she will emerge as if in a fairy-tale as a beautiful, blond white girl. By the age of five or six, Maya has already begun to equate beauty with whiteness, a sign that the racism rampant in the society in which she grows up has infiltrated her mind. Second, uprooted and sent away from her parents at age three, Maya has trouble throughout her life feeling that she belongs anywhere or that she has “come to stay.” Her sense of displacement may stem in part from the fact that black people were not considered full- fledged Americans, but primarily she feels abandoned by her family. When she and

Bailey arrive in Stamps, the note posted on their bodies is not addressed to Annie

Henderson, but rather “To Whom It May Concern.”

The opening scene in the church introduces these important issues while also conveying the frustration, humiliation, disillusionment, and, finally, liberation that define Maya’s childhood. The childish voice interspersed throughout Angelou’s adult reflections suggests that she is probably five or six years old at the time of the opening scene. Maya does not anchor her prologue in a specific time, suggesting that she continues to experience the emotions of this episode over and over again throughout 84 her life. The prologue ends with an unforgettable description that Angelou uses to foreshadow the nature of the story to come.

Maya says that growing up as a black girl in the South is like putting a razor to one’s throat, but, even worse, when that black girl feels alienated from her own black community, her sense of displacement is like the rust on the razor, making life even more unbearable. She says that her displacement is “an unnecessary insult”. Since the opening scene shows that Angelou was aware of her displacement, she prepares us to witness a childhood full of such extra insults. Nevertheless, it is significant that Maya manages to escape the critical, mocking church community and laugh about her liberation, even though she knows that she will be punished for it. Maya’s escape foreshadows her eventual overcoming of the limitations of her childhood.

Maya’s experiences in the Store (“Store” is capitalized by Angelou) tell much about black rural small-town life during the 1930s. After the Civil War and after they had been promised land and animals with which to farm, blacks in the South entered into a period of American history nearly as discriminatory and violent as the period of slavery. The post-reconstruction era, known as the Jim Crow era, witnessed the systematic destruction of the black farmer in the South at the hands of resentful whites who sought to undermine the black entitlement to property, animals, financial support, or even wages. The Jim Crow era also brought with it severe segregation laws that affected every walk of life and spurred the development of white racist organizations, such as the Ku Klux Klan, which terrorized black communities. Positioned in the Store at the centre of the community, Maya vividly and poignantly describes the cotton pickers’ plight, describing their beleaguered bodies, their torn clothes, and their wearied faces when returning from the fields. 85

Moreover, though Stamps is so thoroughly segregated that, as a child, Maya feels she hardly knows what white people look like, the social and economic effects of segregation profoundly affect Maya, her family, and her experiences. Maya recounts

Mr. Steward’s warning of the white lynch mob as an example of the conflicted nature of many whites’ acts of kindness toward blacks. According to Maya, however, his casual attitude toward the terrorization of the black community destroys any virtue his gesture might indicate. Even Willie, whom he deems “innocent,” has to hide in a potato bin all night while the white men scour the black section of Stamps for a scapegoat.

Against the backdrop of such terrifying events, Momma keeps her faith and self-respect, providing an influential example for Maya and Bailey. Her confrontation with the three white girls—another example of the overt insidiousness of racism— becomes a victory for Momma because she refuses to be displaced. While Maya feels apprehension, Momma’s refusal to retreat inside the Store at their approach diffuses any threat the children pose to her authority or her identity.

Under her silent, impassive gaze, their antics become an embarrassment to them, not to Momma. Momma addresses the girls with respect, demonstrating her maturity and poise. She shows that, though these girls may be above her on the social ladder, she is better and stronger than they are. In the context of the girls’ ridiculous and terrible behaviour, a level to which Momma never stoops herself, Momma’s respectful address becomes ironic. From the beginning, Maya shows that Momma and

Bailey—her hero who sticks up for her time and time again—provide her with a loving, respectful foundation that will support her in the future.

Momma’s philosophy regarding the safest way to deal with whites typifies the attitudes prevalent during the Jim Crow era—the period between 1877 and the mid-

1960’s during which a strict racial caste system relegated blacks in the South to the 86 position of second-class citizens. Lynch mobs represented only one danger faced by

American blacks in the rural South. Segregation became more than a physical reality since it influenced the culture and the mind-set of the black population as well. Specific comments about particular people could prove dangerous if those comments reached the wrong ears. Some people might have called Momma a coward, Maya acknowledges, but she adds that Momma would have called herself a realist. Momma survived the odds stacked against her and became a successful businesswoman. She saved the Store in the Great Depression while many white businesses failed all over the country.

In Angelou’s autobiography, Momma emerges as a strong, determined survivor.

Momma chooses her battles well. For example, although Momma does not go out of her way to confront whites and their racism, she offers her help to those who find themselves mired in such confrontations. She and Willie aid a black man fleeing from a lynch mob despite the danger such actions might present to themselves, revealing their quiet bravery. Angelou remarks that when Momma reveals herself as the “Mrs.

Henderson” subpoenaed by the judge, whites considered the incident a joke, but the black community remembered the incident as a testimony to Momma’s stature.

Angelou’s memory of Big Bailey reveals that he stands completely out of place in the rural South. She remarks that he wears tight clothes made of wool and that he pronounces English even better than the school principal. His behaviour indicates that he tried hard to make a big impression. His brashness upset the quiet balance of routine in Momma’s family. His car, his accent, and his clothing were all marks of middle- class status, but he worked as a porter in a California hotel. Angelou never says whether Big Bailey acquired his possessions by saving his wages or by other, perhaps illegal means. 87

Indeed, intelligent black men with goals and aspirations in Big Bailey’s generation had few legal avenues to use to achieve success. In what is known as the

Great Migration, between one and two million black farmers left the South from 1914 to 1930 in search of work in northern cities, where factory owners promised but never provided high-wage jobs. The black migration from the rural countryside to the cities divided blacks from their heritage and their roots, stranding them in a world where, it seemed, one had to look, talk, and act white in order to succeed.

Despite her re-location to the loud, exotic, chaotic, and alien city of St. Louis, to a certain extent Maya shows her ability to engage with her new environment. She does not find true happiness in her relationship with her mother, but she meets a host of strong-willed and idiosyncratic relatives who begin to improve her attitude about herself. She remembers that one of her uncles continually tells her not to worry about her appearance but rather to cherish her intelligence. Moreover, Maya can now place herself in a larger familial context and learn a little about what her life was like before she was sent away, including endearing, love-affirming stories about her brother,

Bailey. She learns that, as a three-year-old, Bailey took responsibility for teaching his sister how to walk.

Maya’s Grandmother Baxter was nearly white and was raised by a German family. She married a black man but chose not to pass as white, and she achieved financial success and security by connecting with the criminal underworld. Maya’s grandfather and uncles are rough city folk who have cultivated a necessary toughness that wards off abuse and exploitation, and her mother’s exotic lifestyle seems to fit right in with Maya’s unusual family. Despite the lack of familiarity, Maya has landed in a more familial world where, she says, “she feels a need to appreciate her benefactors and fears being returned to Stamps” (CB 54). She soon learns that she has 88 not adjusted well and that the family she meets in St. Louis practices criminal behaviour, which affects her personally.

Maya almost begins to appreciate and grow within her surroundings in St.

Louis, her guilt-ridden response to Mr. Freeman’s sexual molestation reveals that she has not adjusted well to her parental abandonment and life of isolation. Mr. Freeman takes advantage of Maya because she has never experienced much physical contact or affection, and she confuses Mr. Freeman’s exploitative behaviour with the physical attention she has yet to receive as a child. Maya’s need for physical contact confuses the incident in her mind so much that she interprets Mr. Freeman’s threat to kill Bailey as an indication that she has done something wrong, although she cannot say what.

Mr. Freeman also takes advantage of Maya’s caring personality, especially her tendency to care for people in similar positions of neglect and pain. Perhaps trying to foreshadow the rape, Maya shows that she spent much time observing Mr. Freeman as he pathetically awaited Vivian’s return in the evenings. Maya notes that Mr. Freeman has breasts like deflated female breasts and how she feels sorry for him. After the two separate incidences of sexual molestation, Mr. Freeman ignores Maya for weeks, augmenting her feelings of rejection and guilt.

Even though Maya further isolates herself in the library, the books do more good than harm. On the one hand, Maya’s favourite stories and fairy-tales teach her the culturally accepted notion those women cannot be heroes, causing her to wish that she could be male. Nevertheless, Maya ceases to want or need Mr. Freeman’s attention because books provide her with companionship. When Mr. Freeman rapes her, he uses the need for affection she previously expressed to blame her for his abuses. When she expresses reluctance to come anywhere near him, he accuses her of enjoying being near him before. 89

Maya highlights the idea that even though blacks suffer from racism and oppression, they remain individuals who can inflict suffering on other people. It is highly probable that some of the Baxter family’s associates in the criminal underground—if not Maya’s uncles themselves—killed Mr. Freeman. When the policeman casually reports that Mr. Freeman has been beaten to death, Grandmother

Baxter tells the children never to mention Mr. Freeman’s name or what they have heard about his death. Afterward, Maya’s family viciously chastises her for being silent.

Even though many of the adults in Maya’s life show their flaws, Maya continues to receive attention and care from others. The fact that Maya and Bailey have begun to grow naturally apart perhaps exacerbates Maya’s isolation and confusion, but

Bailey remains the most important person in her life. He persuades her to reveal the identity of the rapist, and his tearful reaction to learning that the man who lived with him raped Maya reveals the loving support he gives her. Bailey does not betray her trust. He never blames her for the rape or for their sudden return to Stamps.

Once Mrs. Flowers offers Maya a way to speak without fear. Maya welcomes their return to Stamps because life there is predictable, but both Maya’s silence and a general silence regarding the rape persist, and she continues to carry her unarticulated burden of guilt. Reading aloud from books or reciting poems with Mrs. Flowers allows

Maya to speak through the words of others. Maya considers Mrs. Flowers a hero and thus shows that she has begun to forget, to a certain extent, the fact that books portray only males as heroes.

Maya’s immediate reaction to having to lie in court and her subsequent self- imposed silence reveal her strong moral conscience. First, Maya shows that she hates that she must lie out of necessity in the courtroom. She says she now despises Mr.

Freeman for causing her to tell a lie, indicating that she may even hate Mr. Freeman 90 more for making her lie than for the rape itself. Moreover, despite the apparent fact that her vicious uncles, enabled by a loose and corrupt legal system, murder Mr. Freeman,

Maya feels that her lie in court ultimately caused his death.

At the same time, Maya’s attention to her own guilt concerning matters related to Mr. Freeman does not mean that she feels particularly guilty for the rape itself.

Rather, she continues to refer to Mr. Freeman as a “dirty man,” and she begins to strengthen her opinion of herself as an experienced woman. When she enters the courtroom filled with unsavoury characters and “smirking mouths,” Maya remembers that the nurses have told her that she has seen the worst life has to offer her, and she uses their words to bolster her confidence.

She says, “I was eight, and grown,” showing how the incident ultimately sharpens her precocious sense of self. Undoubtedly, she has lost some of the innocence that led to her accept Mr. Freeman’s advances. Now, she puts the rape behind her to a certain extent and pays even more attention to her own character. Throughout the rest of the book, however, Maya must continue to struggle with growing pains, particularly those associated with sex. While she may grow wiser in some ways in St. Louis, she nevertheless remains a confused child.

Maya’s indignation toward Mrs. Cullinan for presumptuously renaming her attests to Maya’s strong pride in herself, now revealed in the face of complex racist forces. Mrs. Cullinan does not bother to learn Maya’s real name, Marguerite, and she chooses to change it for her own convenience. She does not exhibit violent racism, but she perpetrates an indignity that American blacks have faced throughout history. Mrs.

Cullinan’s renaming constitutes yet another form of displacement for Maya, this time racial displacement. She remarks upon the danger associated with calling a black person anything that could be loosely interpreted as insulting because blacks have been 91 labeled negatively for centuries as “niggers, jigs, dinges, blackbirds, crows, boots and spooks.”

Maya’s reaction to Mrs. Cullinan’s re-naming exemplifies the subtle forms of resistance available to American blacks. Maya cannot directly demand recognition of her identity, but she finds a subversive form of resistance. This resistance powerfully affects Mrs. Cullinan. By switching back to Margaret, Mrs. Cullinan believes that she has reasserted her power over Maya as well as protected the holy name Mary from tarnish. Essentially, however, she has relinquished the name that was her symbol of power over Maya. Mary may have been under her control, but Margaret is not. Maya regains her name and her sense of self.

Maya describes numerous other instances of subtle black resistance to racism in this autobiography. The black southern church is an avenue for subversive resistance.

At the revival, the preacher gives a sermon that criticizes white power without directly naming it. His diatribe against greedy, self-righteous employers clearly attacks white farmers for paying miserable wages to black field labour. Movies and other popular culture of the 1930s disseminated terribly demeaning racial stereotypes of blacks.

However, Maya’s secret joke in the movie theatre allows her a kind of resistance against the movie’s negative portrayals of black people.

Maya laughs in response to the Kay Francis movie because the white actress adored by the white audience looks like her mother, a black woman. Incidentally, at the same time that Maya delights in this irony, Bailey clearly suffers with longing for his mother. Just seeing her likeness sends him into a deep melancholy. The intensity of his feelings will eventually create a rift between him and Maya symbolized and foreshadowed here by his running recklessly across the train tracks and abandoning

Maya on the other side. 92

Despite recognizing the personally empowering nature of these instances of resistance, Maya’s descriptions illustrate that such resistance rarely affects great change, even within the African-American community. Instead, such resistance often simply serves to save the black community from drowning in the desperation and despair that envelops them. Maya’s description of the symbolic meaning behind the boxing match between Joe Louis and a white challenger attests to the pervasive nature of racism in 1930s America. For Maya and the members of her community, Joe Louis’s victory is an empowering repudiation of the negative stereotypes heaped upon blacks.

Underlying their joy, however, the desperate fact remains: Louis must bear the hopes and dreams of the entire black American community. White society prevented most forms of black advancement. Moreover, the few black Americans who did advance received little public attention for their achievements. When they did successfully garner public acclaim, role models and heroes such as Louis became figures that the black community relied upon for strength.

Unfortunately, Maya notes, sometimes those who practice subtle forms of resistance defeat themselves. The desperation in the Store during the fight attests to both the highs and the potential lows of the psychological resistance. Immediately after the revival meeting, the spiritually invigorated revivalists hear the people partying at a honky-tonk and bow their heads. Maya notes that the crushing realities of their daily struggles begin to replace their short-lived happiness. Both the sinners at the honky- tonk and the revival members share the same desire to shake off their troubles.

However, the individual revival members only see the differences and suffer from despair. Rather than seeing the honky-tonk as another form of subtle empowerment, the church community sees it as a burden. 93

Louise’s friendship provides Maya with her first opportunity to enjoy her youth and, to a certain extent, her independence. Maya’s experiences prior to their friendship have matured her beyond her years, and Louise is her first childhood friend. Before,

Maya moved and interacted largely in a world of adults, with the exception of Bailey.

With Louise, Maya begins to experience being a young girl for the first time, playing games, inventing languages, discussing boys and young love. It is also Maya’s first relationship that occurs outside her family and apart from her family’s influence.

Whereas Momma may have arranged for Mrs. Flowers to show Maya attention, here

Maya meets her friend while trying to find a private place to relieve herself in the forest. As they spin each other around and look up at the sky, their meeting takes on a magical quality, suggesting its importance in Maya’s development as an individual.

Although Tommy Valdon and the valentine’s crush never leads to romance, it restores some of the innocence in Maya that Mr. Freeman stole from her. In part, Maya feels threatened by the valentine because she has no experience with adolescent crushes. Mainly, however, the rape and its aftermath have led her to distrust anything having to do with both sexual and romantic love. Maya clearly announces that she will not let another man or boy treat her as Mr. Freeman did. Tommy’s second letter, however, states that his affection will not change even if Maya chooses not to respond.

Hearing this, Maya feels more secure because Tommy obviously feels genuine affection for Maya and her personality. Unlike Mr. Freeman, the valentine does not represent any physical expectation from Maya, and, sensing his good intentions, she begins to flirt shyly and innocently with him.

Although less malicious, Joyce’s power over Bailey parallels Mr. Freeman’s power over Maya. Joyce takes advantage of Bailey’s frustrated love for his mother in the same way that Mr. Freeman’s advances prey on Maya’s frustrated need for physical 94 affection. Looking back on the relationship, Maya remarks that Joyce—who is four years older than Bailey—represents for Bailey the mother who let him get close to her and the sister who was never withdrawn.

To a certain extent, moreover, Joyce takes advantage of Bailey as well. As long as Bailey provides her with stolen spoils from the Store, Joyce gives him the affection he craves. She turns Bailey’s innocent, curious games into sexual intercourse, taking his virginity, and then leaves him in the dust. Maya notes that Joyce has a positive effect on Bailey while she is around, but when Joyce skips town, Bailey reveals not just his displeasure at the fact that she has left but also his sense that the situation was not ideal in the first place. When Maya asks him about Joyce, Bailey feigns disinterest at first, but then he says that Joyce has chosen someone who will give her sex all the time, perhaps indicating his understanding that he and Joyce used their relationship for different purposes.

In light of Mr. Taylor’s ghost story, it is important to note that storytelling and imagination, accounts of spirits, the conjuring of images and beings from the past, and even superstition all played vital roles in the African-American tradition. Just as the

Christian church provided slaves, former slaves, and their descendants with a sense of salvation and hope, storytelling and folklore provided them with a form of not just entertainment but empowerment. Because white colonists and Americans drastically altered the lives of slaves and essentially erased their connection with their homeland and their past, slaves began writing their own history through storytelling.

In this case, Mr. Taylor’s ghost story reveals the pervasive nature of tense race relations and conjures up the frightening baby angel as being blond-haired and blue- eyed. Momma’s dialogue with Mr. Taylor steers the conversation to everyday things and dispels the eerie gloom that the ghost story cast over the room. Momma has, in her 95 way, cast out the spectres of malevolent spirits with her quiet determined attention to the details of everyday living.

Edward Donleavy’s speech is a slap in the black community’s face. The black community’s excitement over the graduation comes from the fact that they have had to fight very hard to receive even a modicum of education. Black activists of earlier generations had fought to build schools for black children. Before emancipation, educational opportunities for African-Americans were rare, especially in the South.

After emancipation, black Americans faced hostility toward their education from their former masters. In Stamps, the graduating eighth-grade and high-school classes surmount the pressures of poverty and racism to earn their diplomas. Donleavy’s speech indicates that their achievements in education are worthless and misdirected.

The white school has received tangible improvements aimed at increasing and bettering the opportunities for white students in science and art, but Donleavy’s description of bragging about the college athletes from their school suggests, at best, that the black schools do not receive tangible improvements like the science equipment and new art teacher at the white school. Unfortunately, Donleavy’s remarks shame the black children into bowing their heads and thinking that they should not value their education and their graduation. Maya remarks that Donleavy “exposed” them. Even more insulting, Donleavy expects the students and their parents to be grateful to him for his pathetic efforts.

Momma’s confrontation with Dr. Lincoln introduces the important idea of the ethics of necessity in Maya’s autobiography. Maya imagines that Momma battles Dr.

Lincoln and brings him to his knees, but in reality Momma compromises her own sense of ethics in order to extract money from Dr. Lincoln. Momma admits that it is wrong to demand interest on a loan retroactively. To a certain extent, Maya’s dire situation 96 spurred Momma to demand the interest. The ethics of necessity, however, applies more to the fact that Momma wants Dr. Lincoln to pay for his evil, racist refusal to treat

Maya, and for his ingratitude toward the humane and generous black woman (Momma) who saved his practice with her money.

Momma does not really consider her compromise to be a bad thing, for she and

Willie laugh about the incident while discussing it. The ethics of necessity by which blacks justify lying or even illegal actions to achieve retribution toward whites continues to operate in the autobiography, particularly in San Francisco, when Maya meets Daddy Clidell’s con-artist friends. It differs greatly, however, from the type of serious criminal activity exhibited by Maya’s family in St. Louis.

As a mother, her decision to take Bailey and Maya to California exemplifies her practical nature as well. This time, however, Momma does not laugh while making this sacrifice. In this case, she shows her quiet bravery. She loves her grandchildren so much that she decides to part with them. She chooses to save them from further ugly encounters with racist Southern whites. Although she has never before travelled more than fifty miles from her place of birth, Momma leaves Willie and her business to live in Los Angeles for six months while her grandchildren settle into their new life. The calm with which she makes the abrupt change shows a steely, resourceful character.

Maya’s reversal from disgust to pride during the graduation shows that she has begun to take serious pride in being a member of a resilient black community.

Donleavy’s speech makes Maya terribly angry, to the point where she imagines a retelling of history that is just as murderous and violent toward white people as toward blacks. Not even Henry Reed’s beautiful speech can pull Maya out of her pessimism.

However, when Henry invokes the Negro National Anthem, he reminds the audience, his fellow graduates, and eventually Maya that they should retain their pride in 97 themselves and their abilities. Maya comes to realize that other black people have worked hard to provide her with the opportunity to graduate from school.

Perhaps more important to Maya’s development, given her love for literature and poetry, she comes to understand that blacks have written poetry and literature in celebration of black identity and achievement. Maya remarks that, before, she paid attention only to Patrick Henry and other white freedom fighters. Now, she listens for the first time to the words of James Weldon Johnson’s inspirational song “Lift Ev’ry

Voice and Sing” and no longer considers herself just a member of the graduating class, but also a member of “the wonderful, beautiful Negro race” (CB 71). As an adult looking back, Maya thanks black artists and poets for helping her to sustain her hope and realize her black pride in the midst of disappointment and discouragement.

San Francisco represents an entirely different world from the rural South. Maya attends an unsegregated school. Her education becomes more varied with the addition of drama and dance to her studies. As opposed to the monotony of life in the South, San

Francisco undergoes constant change, especially due to the upheaval of the war.

Similar to the Great Migration in the East, the defence industry’s factories went into full swing in California during the war, and they employed willing blacks and whites alike, especially since the Japanese population had been moved unjustly to internment camps. This harrowing scene of constant displacement becomes, somewhat ironically, the first place where Maya feels a sense of belonging, giving her a new boldness and an awareness of herself. Maya has never felt that she belongs anywhere before, and the constant scene of changing faces in wartime San Francisco—the cyclical wave of newcomers—wards off her own sense of alienation and isolation.

My race groaned. It was our people falling. It was another lynching, yet

another Black man hanging on a tree. One more woman ambushed and 98

raped. . . . This might be the end of the world. If Joe lost we were back

in slavery and beyond help. It would all be true, the accusations that we

were lower types of human beings. Only a little higher than the apes.

(CB 32)

Maya’s descriptions of a multiracial apartment building and an unsegregated school might lead one to think that racial relations were not as tense as they were in the South, but she takes care to explain that this was not the case. The outer face of San Francisco did not show the tumult within. Rural whites brought their prejudices with them to the city. Rural blacks came to the city with their distrust of white people, cultivated through years of negative experiences. In the South, blacks and poor whites lived and worked on unequal, opposite sides of the racial divide. In San Francisco, they worked side by side in the war industry.

In San Francisco, Maya encounters a more brash form of resistance to racial inequality. Whereas Momma thought it sinful yet necessary to insist that Dr. Lincoln pay ten dollars in interest when she had not asked for it initially, Daddy Clidell’s friends lie and cheat to make $40,000 off white men. Momma’s quiet rebellions were replaced by the financially rewarding methods of Daddy Clidell’s friends, who catered to racial stereotypes in order to lure racist whites into their con games. They learned to turn white prejudice into a liability for whites. Despite the difference between Momma and the con-men’s methods, Maya shows that in both cases the ethical standard is based on necessity and justifies the means used to produce change.

The standard of ethics differs for the black community because if people cannot compete equally in society, they must find ways to advance by manipulating the system. Fair play ceased to have moral value when the rules of the game proved unfair.

For the most part, the cotton-field labourers in Stamps accepted their difficult existence 99 with resignation. Their resistance came in the form of personal empowerment and psychological stamina. The wartime generation, however, gained a sense of entitlement and wielded its creative powers to act upon it.

Nearly every scene in the autobiography illustrates Maya’s blossoming awareness of, and her love and respect for, herself. She states, “If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust onthe razor that threatens the throat. It is an unnecessary insult” (CB 45).Maya’s emboldened sense of self shines forth in her impulsive decision to drive the car back to the U.S. from

Mexico. Even though she has an accident, she says that she felt better than at any other time in her life. Maya is so confident in herself and proud of her achievement that she declares that she did not even need her father’s praise at first, even though she becomes angry when he continues to ignore her accomplishment. When Big Bailey asks Maya about her opinion of Dolores, Maya remarks upon Dolores’s pettiness and says that

Dolores does not like her based upon her physical appearance.

After overhearing the argument between Big Bailey and Dolores, Maya feels heroic and merciful when she tries to console Dolores. Maya has changed from a self- conscious and nervous girl to a defiant young woman, perhaps remaking herself in the image of the strong women who have influenced her. Indeed, besides the obvious parallels to Momma’s dignified nature, Maya acts very much like Vivian, particularly when she warns Dolores before slapping her in the same way that Vivian warned her partner before shooting him.

Maya compares Big Bailey’s lack of paternal graces with Daddy Clidell’s strength as a father figure. Maya’s description of Big Bailey’s reaction to the confrontation and the injury hints at sarcasm and shows that she considers Big Bailey to be utterly selfish, even if he comes across as a likable character. He chooses to take 100

Maya to a friend for treatment of her wound instead of a doctor because he wants to avoid personal embarrassment. He does not directly ask Maya to keep quiet about the incident, but he implies that she should do so, explaining how a scandal could damage his reputation.

Bailey was talking so fast he forgot to stutter, he forgot to scratch his

head and clean his fingernails with his teeth. He was away in a mystery,

locked in the enigma that young Southern Black boys start to unravel,

start to try to unravel, from seven years old to death. The humourless

puzzle of inequality and hate. (CB 89)

As if speaking for Big Bailey but with a melodramatic flare, Maya asks the reader rhetorically, “Could I imagine the scandal if people found out that his, Bailey

Johnson’s, daughter had been cut by his lady friend?” (CB 98). She ironically exaggerates the response to her question by saying that all black people in the city would hang their heads in shame if Big Bailey’s troubles became known publicly.

Daddy Clidell, on the other hand, shows his pride when people think that Maya is his biological daughter. He has no insecurities to hide and no superiority to flaunt. As a result, he gives Maya affection and respect, and she considers him the first real father figure in her life.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings ends with Maya’s rapid journey into adulthood. Maya experiences important intellectual growth while staying in the junkyard. After a month, she says, “[M]y thinking processes had so changed that I was hardly recognizable to myself” (CB 89). Before she stays in the junkyard, she has limited contact with people of other races. That month in the junkyard, she forms full- fledged friendships with Mexican and white teenagers. Her acceptance into such a 101 mixed group proves an unusual experience, considering her isolated childhood. She feels that she is part of the greater human race.

The experience in the junkyard also shows that Maya’s growing sense of independence and confidence in herself has begun to coalesce and intensify. Only days before, she surprised herself by driving the car in Mexico, and now she strikes out on her own to spend a month in a junkyard living in a responsibly managed communal society. The intensity of her poise and self-assurance fuels her quest for the position on the streetcar when she returns home to San Francisco. Other employers desperately seek labourers at higher wages without discrimination, yet Maya refuses to give up the job she has chosen. At age fifteen, she has developed a surprising adult will. Once hired, she ceases to live in a world demarcated by black neighbourhoods and continues to rush headlong into the larger world.

Nevertheless, Maya’s most rapid affirmation of her induction into the world of adulthood—the birth of her baby boy—also symbolizes the fact that Maya is still a child in many ways. The final chapter details Maya’s sensual awakening, not unlike the awakening of a typical adolescent, complete with fears and questions about sex and appearance. Angelou specifically references her youthful innocence when she uses the phrase “had I been older” in describing the incident with her classmate’s beautiful breasts.

Just as Maya’s rape appeared to be a direct result of her displacement, in some ways Maya’s pregnancy results from her continued displacement from her mother

Vivian. Vivian certainly takes Maya seriously when Maya questions her about sex.

Vivian does not, however, take an active interest in finding out whether she has answered all of Maya’s questions; thinking that everything will be all right once Maya washes her face, has a glass of milk, and returns to sleep. Even up until the end of the 102 book, Vivian continues to look at Maya not out of the corner of her eye, but “out of the corner of her existence”. Maya remains a child sexually and thus without parental guidance in matters concerning sex she is loosed to the world of sex and pregnancy and physical adulthood with only her own instincts to guide her.

The autobiography ends, however, with an overwhelmingly positive picture of

Vivian. Vivian makes mistakes along the way, but she nevertheless survives with the strength and honesty that provide sustenance for and rub off on Maya in the end. When

Maya becomes pregnant, Vivian supports and encourages her without condemnation, and she gives Maya her first and most important lesson about trusting her maternal instincts. Maya admires her unflinching honesty, her strength, and her caring nature, despite her frequent fumbling as a parent.

The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common

forces of nature at the same time that she is caught in the tripartite

crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of

power. The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a

formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even

belligerence. (CB 61)

Angelou places both Vivian and even herself within the tradition of black women with strong characters and honourable survival mechanisms. Angelou says she often hears people react to the formidable character of black women in America as if they are surprised or offended. This, in turn, surprises Angelou. She feels that black women must struggle so much to survive that, when they do, their formidable character is predictable. She goes on to say that this inevitable strength of character should be respected if not accepted with enthusiasm. Maya demonstrates that the universal 103 struggles of adolescence combine with the stresses of race and gender to make black women’s struggles all the more challenging.

A light shade had been pulled down between the Black community and

all things white, but one could see through it enough to develop a fear-

admiration-contempt for the white “things”—white folks’ cars and white

glistening houses and their children and their women. But above all,

their wealth that allowed them to waste was the most enviable. (CB 78)

Even if one is unacquainted with Angelou’s poem of the same name, the title of I Know

Why the Caged Bird Sings seems particularly apt given the subject matter of the book.

Maya compares herself, her black female role models, and even her entire race to the bird who is locked in a cage but nevertheless sings. Maya implies that by reading her autobiography, the reader will come to understand why the bird sings despite being locked up in a cage. At the same time, the title implies the possibility that the reason why the caged bird sings could be a secret, one that Maya holds close inside her, away from the tampering, meddling forces of the prison master. We can guess why the bird sings—perhaps to break free, perhaps to provide solace to it, perhaps because its voice is its only means of action or communication, or perhaps because the bird feels joy knowing something others do not. Maya’s widely varied and insightful depiction of the

African-American struggle affords many possible reasons.

Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings explores growing up Black and female in the American South during the second quarter of this century. The world to which Angelou introduces us is embroidered with humiliation, violation, displacement and loss. From the outset, Angelou sounds the pervading themes when she declares “if growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat. It is an unnecessary insult” (Tate 11). This 104 autobiography is written in first person account of Angelou’s life from the age of three, when she arrived in Stamps, Arkansas to live with her grandmother, to the age of sixteen, when she gave birth out of wedlock to her only child in San Francisco.

In the opening scene, Maya flees in embarrassment from the Coloured

Methodist Episcopal Church in Stamps, then in St. Louis, back in Stamps, and finally to remember her Easter service lines. The succeeding thirty-six chapters depict her life in Stamps, then in St. Louis, back in Stamps, and finally in California through vignettes arranged in chronological order. Angelou relates events from the perspective of the middle –aged adult she was when writing, but she gives them the flavour and personality of the child experiencing them. The resulting combination of a black girl’s innocence and the confident, penetrating, sometimes bitter insights of a knowledgeable and successful black woman lend the narrative tension, drama and force.

The centre of Angelou’s life in Stamps was the general store owned by her grandmother, Annie Henderson – “Momma” to Maya and her brother Bailey, who was a year older and her closest friend throughout childhood. Maya recalls optimistic mornings when black cotton pickers met at the store and their despairing evening return from the fields. She remembers helping to hide Uncle Willie in a vegetable bin in the store after a condescending former sheriff warns, “A crazy nigger messed with a white lady today. Some of the boys’ll be coming over here later” ( CB 68). She recall an incident in front of the store when some white children torment “Momma” who keeps her dignity but says nothing.

Maya’s father visited Stamps when she was eight – she and her brother never understood why their divorced parents had sent them back to their grandmother – drove

Maya and Bailey to St. Louis to live with their mother. During their year there, Maya was raped by her mother’s live-in lover, who was subsequently murdered, presumably 105 by Maya’s enraged male relatives. Back in Stamps, Maya moped around in sullen silence for a year, but she found direction and pride through her acquaintance with the sophisticated and sympathetic Bertha Flowers, a “lady who threw me my first life line .

. . our side’s answer to the richest white woman in town” (CB 89).

Saturdays, summer picnic fish fries and Holy Roller revivals left special marks on Maya’s memory. The Holy Rollers energized the otherwise understandably discouraged black community through oblique criticism of the “white folk”. As the preacher put it: “Charity don’t say, because I give you a job, you got to bend your knee to me” (CB 39). Graduation for the eighth grade class of 1940 – the whole young population had come down with graduation epidemic – was almost ruined by an insensitive, patronizing white guest speaker. Nevertheless, the ceremony ended in bold jubilation with everyone joining the class valedictorian, who included his speech with

“lift ev’ry voice and sing” (CB 102). It was a poem written by James Weldon Jones. It was the music composed by J. Rosamond Johnson. It was the Negro national anthem.

Among her last memories of Stamps is the day Momma took her to the local white dentist to have two painful teeth pulled. The dentist, who had borrowed money from Momma during the depression, refused to treat Maya, telling Momma, “Annie, my policy us I’d rather stick my hand in a dog’s mouth than in a nigger’s” (CB32).

Momma then demanded interest on the money she had previously lent the dentist; with that ten dollars, she took Maya by bus to a dentist in Texarkana.

At thirteen, Maya left Arkansas for good. Momma took her and Bailey to live in

Los Angeles for six months. Momma then returned to Stamps, while Maya and Bailey joined their mother in San Francisco. It was during World War II, and blacks had taken over the formerly Japanese Fillmore section. Maya had an inspiring teacher named

Miss Kirwin at George Washington High School, and she won a scholarship to study 106 drama and dance at night at the California Labour School. Her mother was married to a wealthy, self-made man named Daddy Clidell. In their building lived black con artists who regaled Maya with wonderful tales of out-witting whites.

Maya travelled to Los Angeles to spend the summer with her father. Formerly a doorman at the Breakers Hotel in Santa Monica and them a member of the kitchen staff at a navy hospital, Bailey Johnson, Sr., lived in a mobile home with a woman who knifed Maya, who started a fight when the woman had called Maya’s mother a whore.

After the fight, Maya decided to strike out on her own and lived for a month in an abandoned automobile in a junkyard in the company of other young blacks doing the same. Upon her return to San Francisco, she became an assistant streetcar conductor.

Bailey, who had fought with his mother, left home to start his own life as a dining-car waiter on the Southern Pacific Railroad.

Angelou remembers herself at fifteen as not pretty, nearly six feet tall and flat chested. She worries about the possibility of being a lesbian and as a result decides to have sex with a handsome young man who lives in the neighbourhood. It was a forgettable encounter but had one long-lasting result which made Maya pregnant. After finishing high school, Maya gives birth to a son at sixteen. Her recollection of sleeping peacefully and protectively next to her new born son brings the autobiographical narrative to a close.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Singsis full of sights into the American rural black community in the 1930’s and its worldview. For white readers, the insights are revelations often surprising and discomfiting, while black readers can see them as an exhilarating, poignant and unprecedented sharing of community memories and experiences. Angelou reveals childhood dreams of waking up white, childhood envy of 107 girls with “good” hair – “more straight than kinky” – lifelong paranoia about white people and their world, and the pervasiveness of racism in American life.

Readers come gradually to share Maya’s sense of pride in the everyday achievements of Momma, Bailey, Sr., Uncle Willie, Bailey, Jr., and other blacks weighted down with disadvantages. Nevertheless, readers may wonder how reasonable

Maya’s hopes are at the end of the book, as she, an unwed teenage mother with no money or demonstrated talents or skills, begins to face the world on her own. Yet even without reading her later books or knowing the details of her remarkably productive and rich life, readers can guess from Angelou’s writing that many of her hopes were attainable.

Angelou brings a rich and varied vocabulary, a feeling for the rhythms of speech and a fertile imagination to bear on the slightest recollection from childhood.

Her use of metaphor and simile, which almost invariably communicates the richness of her family and community environment and the black American culture of which they were part, is especially engaging. She recalls “molasses-slow minutes” and “laughter crackling and popping like pine logs in a cooking stove” (CB 54). At a summer picnic,

“chickens and spareribs sputtered in their own fat and a sauce whose recipe was guarded in the family like a scandalous affair” (CB 88).

The harmony of a gospel rehearsing was “packed as tight as sardines” (CB 89).

At one point during her eight-grade graduation exercises, “Amens and Yes, sir’s began to fall around the moon like rain through a ragged umbrella” (CB 89). Later when

Angelou was pregnant, her mother was tied up tighter than Dick’s hatband in the weave of her own life. Nevertheless, Angelou’s control of imagery and metaphor does not make merely for stylish writing. They create drama and force in her commentary on her life. Of her own rape, she says, “the act of rape on eight-year old body is a matter of the 108 needle giving because the camel can’t. The child gives, because the body can, and the mind of the violator cannot” (CB 90).

She also notes the pains of being black and female in the South. The Black woman in the South who raises sons, grandsons and nephews had her heartstrings tied to a hanging noose. The black man’s fate is no better. Of her father Angelou observes:

“he was a lonely person searching relentlessly in bottles, under women’s skirts, in church work and lofty titles for his personal niche, lost before birth and unrecovered since” (CB 67).

Ultimately, Angelou’s candour and honesty can fascinate or unnerve the reader.

She finds meaning and special value in unvarnished recollections of difficult times and imperfect people. She loves her people and cherishes her past with them both because of and in spite of what they were. She can do this because she possess an inner strength that the reader comes to recognize is the result of her special heritage as black

American woman.

Gather Together in My Name(1974) is an autobiography by African-American writer and poet Maya Angelou. It is the second book in Angelou's series of seven autobiographies. The book begins immediately following the events described in I

Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and follows Angelou, called Rita, from the ages of 17 to 19. Written three years after Caged Bird, the book "depicts a single mother's slide down the social ladder into poverty and crime. The title of the book is taken from the

Bible, but it also conveys how one Black female survived in the white-dominated society of post-war America, and speaks for all Black females.

Angelou expands upon many themes she started discussing in her first autobiography, including motherhood and family, race and racism, identity, and education and literacy. Rita becomes closer to her mother in this book, and goes 109 through a variety of jobs and relationships as she tries to provide for her young son and find her place in the world. Angelou continues to discuss racism in Gather Together, but moves from speaking for all Black women to describing how one young woman dealt with it. The book exhibits the narcissism of young people, but describes how Rita discovers her identity. Like many of Angelou's autobiographies, Gather Together is concerned with Angelou's on-going self-education.

Gather Together was not as critically acclaimed as Angelou's first autobiography, but received mostly positive reviews and was recognized as better written. The book's structure, consisting of a series of episodes tied together by theme and content, parallels the chaos of adolescence, which some critics feel makes it an unsatisfactory sequel to Caged Bird. Rita's many physical movements throughout the book, which affects the book's organization and quality, has caused at least one critic to call it a travel narrative. Through the writing of this autobiography and her life stories in all of her books, Angelou became recognized and highly respected as a spokesperson for Blacks and women. According to scholar Joanne Braxton, it made her "without a doubt ... America's most visible black woman autobiographer"(12).

The title of Gather Together is inspired by Matthew 18:19-20: "Again I say unto you, That if two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven. For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them" (King James

Version). While Angelou acknowledged the title's biblical origin, she also stated that the title counteracted the tendency of many adults to lie to their children about their pasts. Scholar Sondra O'Neale states that the title is "a New Testament injunction for the traveling soul to pray and commune while waiting patiently for deliverance"(34). A prevailing theme in Gather Together shows how one Black female was able to survive 110 in the wider context of post-war America, but it also speaks for all Black women, and how they can survive in a white-dominated society. Critic Selwyn R. Cudjoe agrees:

"The incidents in the book appear merely gathered together in the name of Maya

Angelou"(14).

The book opens in the years following World War II. Angelou, still known as

"Marguerite," or "Rita," has just given birth to her son Clyde, and is living with her mother and stepfather in San Francisco. The book follows Marguerite from the ages of

17 to 19, through a series of relationships, occupations, and cities as she attempts to raise her son and to find her place in the world. It continues exploring the themes of

Angelou's isolation and loneliness begun in her first volume, and the ways she overcomes racism, sexism, and her continued victimization.

Rita goes from job to job and from relationship to relationship, hoping that "my charming prince was going to appear out of the blue" (GT 34). "My fantasies were little different than any other girl of my age", Angelou wrote. "He would come. He would.

Just walk into my life, see me and fall everlastingly in love ... I looked forward to a husband who would love me ethereally, spiritually, and on rare (but beautiful) occasions, physically"(GT 35).

Some humorous and potentially dangerous events occur throughout the book while Rita tries to care for herself and her son. In San Diego, Rita becomes an absentee manager for two lesbian prostitutes. When threatened with incarceration and with losing her son for her illegal activities, she and Clyde escape to her grandmother's home in Stamps, Arkansas. Her grandmother sends them to San Francisco for their safety and protection after physically punishing Rita for confronting two white women in a department store. This event demonstrates their different and irreconcilable attitudes about race, paralleling events in Angelou's first book. She states: 111

Growing up, becoming responsible, having to think ahead and assuming

the postures of adulthood had certain compensations for me. One that I

weekly appreciated was the freedom to sleep late on Sundays.

(Somehow the bed was more sensual on that morning than weekdays). I

loved the soul-stirring songs and heartily approved of the minister’s

passions, but being penned shoulder to shoulder with a rocking crowd of

strangers for three hours or more did nothing for my soul. (GT 46)

Back with her mother in San Francisco, Rita attempts to enlist in the Army, only to be rejected during the height of the Red Scare because she had attended the California

Labour School as a young teenager. Another event of note described in the book was, in spite of "the strangest audition", her short stint dancing and studying dance with her partner, R. L. Poole, who became her lover until he reunited with his previous partner, ending Rita's show business career for the time being.

A turning point in the book occurs when Rita falls in love with the Episcopalian preacher L. D. Tolbrook, who seduces Rita and introduces her to prostitution. Her mother's hospitalization and death of her brother Bailey's wife drives Rita to her mother's home. She leaves her young son with a caretaker, Big Mary, but when she returns for him, she finds that Big Mary had disappeared with Clyde. She tries to elicit help from Tolbrook, who puts her in her place when she finds him at his home and requests that he help her find her son. She finally realizes that he had been taking advantage of her, but is able to trace Big Mary and Clyde to Bakersfield, California, and has an emotional reunion with her son.

She writes, "In the plowed farmyard near Bakersfield, I began to understand that uniqueness of the person. He was three and I was nineteen, and never again would

I think of him as a beautiful appendage of myself"(GT 78).The end of the book finds 112

Rita defeated by life: "For the first time I sat down defenceless to await life's next assault"(GT 66). The book ends with an encounter with a drug addict who cared enough for her to show her the effects of his drug habit, which galvanizes her to reject drug addiction and to make something of her life for her and her son. Maya pathetically says:

I had managed in a few tense years to become a snob on all levels,

racial, cultural and intellectual. I was a madam and thought myself

morally superior to the whores. I was a waitress and believed myself

cleverer than the customers I served I was a lonely unmarried mother

and held myself to be freer than the married women I met. (GT 61)

Beginning in Gather Together, motherhood and family issues are important themes throughout Angelou's autobiographies. The book describes the change and the importance of Rita's relationship with her own mother, the woman who had abandoned her and her brother as children, demonstrated by Rita's return to her mother at the end of the book,after she realizes how close to the edge she has come, as a woman and as a mother. Vivian Baxter cares for Rita's young son as Rita attempts to make a living.

Critic Mary Jane Lupton states that "one gets a strong sense throughout Gather

Together of [Rita's] dependence on her mother"(77).

Angelou's relationship with her mother becomes more important in Gather

Together, and that Vivian is now more influential in the development of Angelou's attitudes. Clyde's kidnapping is a powerful sequence of mother-loss and connects it to the kidnapping of Clyde's son in the 1980s. Angelou has compared the production of this book to giving birth, an apt metaphor given the birth of her son at the end of Caged

Bird. Like many authors, Angelou views the creative writing process and its results as her children. 113

Angelou's goal, beginning with her first autobiography, was to tell the truth about the lives of black women, but her goal evolved, in her later volumes, to document the ups and downs of her own life. Angelou's autobiographies have the same structure: they give a historical overview of the places she was living in at the time, how she coped within the context of a larger white society, and the ways that her story played out within that context. In Gather Together, Angelou is still concerned with the questions of what it means to be a Black female in the US, but focuses upon herself at a certain point in history, in the years immediately following World War II. The book begins with a prologue describing the confusion and disillusionment of the African-

American community during that time, which matched the alienated and fragmented nature of the main character's life. According to Maya, African Americans were promised a new racial order that did not materialize.

During this time when my life hinged melodramatically on intrigue and

deceit, I discovered the Russian writers. One title caught my eye. Not

because I felt guilty raking in money from the raking in money from the

doings of prostitutes but because of the title’s perfect balance. Life as far

as I deduced it, was a series of opposites: black/white, up/down,

life/death, rich/poor, love/hate, happy/sad, and no mitigating areas in

between. It followed Crime/Punishment. (GT 65)

Halfway through Gather Together, an incident occurs that demonstrates the different ways in which Rita and her grandmother handle racism. Rita, when she is insulted by white clerk during a visit to Stamps, reacts with defiance, but when Momma hears about the confrontation, she slaps Rita and sends her back to California. Rita feels that her personhood was being violated, but the practical Momma knows that her granddaughter's behaviour was dangerous. Rita's grandmother is no longer an important 114 influence on her life, and Angelou demonstrates that she had to move on in the fight against racism.

Along with other black children in small Southern villages, I had

accepted the total polarization of the races as a psychological comfort.

Whites existed, as no one denied, but they were not present in my

everyday life. In fact, months often passed in my childhood when I only

caught sight of the thin hungry po white trash (sharecroppers), who lived

sadder and meaner lives than the blacks I knew. I had no idea that I had

outgrown childhood’s protection until I arrived back in Stamps. (GT 75)

Angelou's use of understatement, self-mockery, humour, and irony in Gather Together and the rest of Angelou's autobiographies cause readers to wonder what she left out and unsure about how to respond to the events Angelou describes. Angelou's depictions of her experiences of racism force white readers to explore their feelings about race and their privileged status. Many critics have focused on where Angelou fits within the genre of African American autobiography and on her literary techniques, readers react to her storytelling with surprise, particularly when they enter the text with certain expectations about the genre of autobiography.

Gather Together retains the freshness of Caged Bird, but has a self- consciousness absent from the first volume. Angelou replaces the language of social history with the language of therapy. The book exhibits the narcissism and self- involvement of young adults. It is Rita who is the focus, and all other characters are secondary, and they are often presented with the deft superficiality of a stage description who pay the price for Rita's self-involvement. Much of Angelou's writing in this volume, as Als states, is "reactive, not reflective". Angelou chooses to demonstrate

Rita's narcissism in Gather Together by dropping the conventional forms of 115 autobiography, which has a beginning, middle, and end. For example, there is no central experience in her second volume, as there is in Caged Bird with Angelou's account of her rape at the age of eight. Lupton believes that this central experience is relocated "to some luminous place in a volume yet to be"(71).

Gather Together, like much of African-American literature, depicts Rita's search for self-discovery, identity, and dignity in the difficult environment of racism, and how she, like other African Americans, were able to rise above it. Rita's search is expressed both outwardly, through her material needs, and inwardly, through love and family relationships. In Caged Bird, despite trauma and parental rejection, Rita's world is relatively secure, but the adolescent young woman in Gather Together experiences the dissolution of her relationships many times. She states of doing the work of a prostitute:

I reassured myself. I was helping my man. And, after all, there was

nothing wrong with sex. I had no need for shame. Society dictated that

sex was only licensed by marriage documents. Well, I didn’t agree with

that. Society is a conglomerate of human beings, and that’s just what

I was. A human being. (GT 167)

The loneliness that ensues for her is a loneliness that becomes, at times, suicidal and contributes to her unanchored self. Rita is unsure of who she is or what she would become, so she tries several roles in a restless and frustrated way, as adolescents often do during this period of their lives. Her experimentation was part of her self-education that would successfully bring her into maturity and adulthood. Rita survives through trial and error while defining herself as a Black woman. Angelou recognizes that the mistakes she depicts are part of "the fumblings of youth and to be forgiven as such", but young Rita insists that she take responsibility for herself and her child. 116

Angelou is still concerned with what it means to be Black and female in

America, but she now describes a particular type of Black woman at a specific moment in history and subjected to certain social forces which assault the Black woman with unusual intensity. When Angelou was concerned about what her readers would think when she disclosed that she had been a prostitute, her husband Paul Du Feu encouraged her to be honest and tell the truth as a writer.

Her reluctance to disclose these events in the text, stating that although they are important in her social development, Angelou does not seem particularly proud of her activity during those few tense years. Angelou has stated that she wrote the book, in spite of potentially harming the reputation she gained after writing Caged Bird, because she wanted to show how she was able to survive in a world where “every door is not only locked, but there are no doorknobs . The children need to know you can stumble and fumble and fall, see where you are and get up, forgive yourself, and go on about the business of living your life"(GT 45).

Feminist scholar Maria Lauret states that the formation of female cultural identity is woven into Angelou's narrative, setting her up as "a role model for Black women"(54). Angelou reconstructs the Black woman's image throughout her autobiographies, and that uses her many roles, incarnations, and identities in her books to signify multiple layers of oppression and personal history. Angelou begins this technique in her first book, and continues it in Gather Together, especially her demonstration of the "racist habit" of renaming African Americans. Angelou's themes deal with the individual's strength and ability to overcome their sufferings.

Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry like Christmasis the third book of Maya

Angelou's seven-volume autobiography series. Set between 1949 and 1955, the book spans Angelou's early twenties. In this volume, Angelou describes her struggles to 117 support her young son, form meaningful relationships, and forge a successful career in the entertainment world. The work's 1976 publication was the first time an African-

American woman had expanded her life story into a third volume. Scholar Dolly

McPherson calls the book "a graphic portrait of the adult self in bloom"(37), while critic Lyman B. Hagen calls it "a journey of discovery and rebirth"(89).

In Singin' and Swingin', Angelou examines many of the same subjects and themes in her previous autobiographies including travel, music, race, conflict, and motherhood. Angelou depicts the conflict she felt as a single mother, despite her success as a performer as she travels Europe with the musical Porgy and Bess. Her depictions of her travels, which take up 40 per cent of the book, have roots in the

African-American slave narrative. Angelou uses music and musical concepts throughout Singin' and Swingin'. It is called Angelou's "praisesong" to Porgy and Bess.

Angelou's stereotypes about race and race relations are challenged as she interacts more with people of different races. During the course of this narrative, she changes her name from Marguerite Johnson to Maya Angelou for professional reasons. Her young son changes his name as well, from Clyde to Guy, and their relationship is strengthened as the book ends.

Speaking about her life, Angelou states:

My life was an assemblage of strivings and my energies were directed

toward acquiring more than the basic needs. I was as much a part of the

acquisitive, security-conscious fifties as the quiet young white girls who

lived their pastel Peter Pan-col-lared days in clean, middle-class

neighbourhoods. In the Black communities, girls, whose clothes struck

with gay colours and whose laughter crinkled the air, flashed streetwise

smirks and longed for one picket fence. We startled with our overt 118

flirtations and dreamed of being “one man’s woman”. We found

ourselves too often unmarried, bearing lonely pregnancies and wishing

for and a half children each who would gurgle happily behind that picket

fence while we drove our men to work in our friendly-looking wagons.

(GT 17)

Angelou followed her first two installations of her autobiography, I Know Why the

Caged Bird Sings (1969) and Gather Together in My Name (1974), with Singin' and

Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas, published in 1976. It marked the first time a well-known African-American woman writer had expanded her life story into a third autobiography. Angelou was one of the first African-American female writers to publicly discuss her personal life, and one of the first to use herself as a central character in her books, something she continued in Singin' and Swingin'. Writer Julian

Mayfield, who calls I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings"a work of art that eludes description", states that Angelou's work set a precedent not only for other Black women writers, but for the genre of autobiography as a whole.

Angelou regarded as one of the "pioneers of self-exposure", focuses honestly on the more negative aspects of her personality and choices. For example, while Angelou was composing her second autobiography, Gather Together in My Name, she was concerned about how her readers would react to her disclosure that she had been a prostitute. Her husband Paul Du Feu talked her into publishing the book by encouraging her to tell the truth as a writer and be honest about it. Through the writing of her life stories, however, Angelou has become recognized and highly respected as a spokesperson for Blacks and women. It made her, as scholar Joanne Braxton stated,

"without a doubt ... America's most visible black woman autobiographer"(31). 119

According to Angelou, the book's title came from the rent parties of the 1920s and 1930s, where people would pay the host an inexpensive entry fee and then eat and drink throughout the weekend. As Angelou stated, people would "sing and swing and get merry like Christmas so one would have some fuel with which to live the rest of the week"(SS 23). These parties, also called "parlour socials", were attended by members of the working class who were unable to afford to go to Harlem's more expensive clubs.

The concept of the rent party helps describe Angelou's position as a single mother from the South who goes to California and sings and swings for a living. She entertains others for little money as a singer, B-girl, and dancer, without getting very merry at all.

The song is like a folkloric title symbolic of the author's long-deserved ascent to success and fulfilment.

One of the many similes Angelou uses, is tied to the book's themes. Angelou uses "old-fashioned" and "positive" words—singin' and swingin' —that reflect several meanings related to the text. These words describe the beginnings of Angelou's career as an entertainer, but the ironies in the terms also depict the conflict Angelou felt about her son. The words gettin' merry like Christmas are also ironic: "Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas was Angelou's most unmerry autobiography.

Because music is one of the book's themes, Angelou uses abbreviated verb endings in her title that reflect Black dialect and evoke the sound of a blues singer.

Singin' and Swingin' opens shortly after Angelou's previous autobiography,

Gather Together in My Name. Marguerite, or Maya, a single mother with a young son, is in her early twenties, struggling to make a living. Angelou writes in this book, like her previous works, about the full range of her own experiences. When one encounters

Maya Angelou in her story, one encounters the humour, the pain, the exuberance, the 120 honesty, and the determination of a human being who has experienced life fully and retained her strong sense of self. Maya states:

The knowledge had to remain inside me, unrevealed, or I would have to

make decision, and that decision had been made for me by the centuries

of slavery, the violation of my people, the violence of whites. Anger and

guilt decided before my birth that Black was Black and White was

White and although the two might share sex, they must never exchange

love. . . . I would never forget the slavery tales, or my Southern past,

where all whites, including the poor and ignorant, had the right to speak

rudely and even physically abuse any Negro they met. I knew the

ugliness of white prejudice. (GT 28).

Many people around Angelou influence her growth and—propel Angelou ever forward.

The book's opening chapters find Maya concerned with, as Hagen asserts,

"Apprehension about her son, a desire for a home, and facing racial conflicts, and seeking a career" (SS 54). Maya is offered a job as a salesgirl in a record shop on

Fillmore Street in San Francisco. At first she greets her boss' offers of generosity and friendship with suspicion, but after two months of searching for evidence of racism,

Maya begins torelax and enjoy a world of music. The job allows her to move back into her mother's house and to spend more time with her son.

While working in the store, Maya meets Tosh Angelos, a Greek sailor. They fall in love, and he is especially fond of her son. Against her mother's wishes, Maya marries

Tosh in 1952. At first, the marriage is satisfying, and it seems that Maya has fulfilled her dream of being a housewife, writing "My life began to resemble a Good

Housekeeping advertisement"(SS75). Eventually, Maya begins to resent Tosh's 121 demands that she stay at home; she is also bothered by her friends' negative reaction to her interracial marriage. About her marriage, Maya states:

The distaste on their face called me back to a history of discrimination

and murders of every type. Tosh, I told myself, was Greek, not white

American; therefore I needn’t feel I had betrayed my race by marrying

one of the enemy, nor could white Americans believe that I had so

forgiven them the past that I was ready to love a member of their tribe.

I never admitted that I made the same kind of rationalization about all

the other non-Blacks I liked. (SS 35)

Maya is disturbed by Tosh's atheism and his control of her life, but does little to challenge his authority. After Tosh tells her son Clyde that there is no God, Maya rebels by secretly attending Black churches. After three years the marriage disintegrates when Tosh announces to Maya that he is tired of being married. She goes into the hospital for an appendectomy, and after the operation, she announces her desire to return to her grandmother in Stamps, but Tosh informs her that Annie died the day of

Maya's operation.

A single mother once again, Maya begins to find success as a performer. She gets a job dancing and singing at The Purple Onion, a popular nightclub in San

Francisco, and—on the recommendation of the club's owners—she changes her name from Marguerite Johnson to the "more exotic""Maya Angelou". She gains the attention of talent scouts, who offer her a role in Porgy and Bess; she turns down the part, however, because of her obligations to The Purple Onion. When her contract expires,

Maya goes to New York City to audition for a part opposite Pearl Bailey, but she turns it down to join a European tour of Porgy and Bess. 122

Leaving Clyde with her mother, Maya travels to 22 countries with the touring company in 1954 and 1955, expressing her impressions about her travels. She writes the following about Verona: "I was really in Italy. Not Maya Angelou, the person of pretensions and ambitions, but me, Marguerite Johnson, who had read about Verona and the sad lovers while growing up in a dusty Southern village poorer and more tragic than the historic town in which I now stood"(SS 61). Despite Maya's success with

Porgy and Bess, she is racked with guilt and regret about leaving her son behind. After receiving bad news about Clyde's health, she quits the tour and returns to San

Francisco. Both Clyde and Maya heal from the physical and emotional toll caused by their separation, and she promises never to leave him again. Clyde also announces that he wants to be called "Guy".

As Angelou writes: "It took him only one month to train us. He became Guy and we could hardly remember ever calling him anything else"(SS 65).Maya is true to her promise; she accepts a job performing in Hawaii, and he goes with her. At the close of the book, mother and son express pride in each other. When he praises her singing, she writes: "Although I was not a great singer I was his mother, and he was my wonderful, dependently independent son"( SS 73).

A show girl. I was going to be a star shinning in the firmament of show

biz. Once more adventure had claimed me as its own, and the least

I could do was show bravery in my strut and courage in the way

I accepted the challenge. It was time to celebrate. (SS 59).

All seven of Angelou's instalments of her life story continue the tradition of African-

American autobiography. Starting with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou makes a deliberate attempt while writing her books to challenge the usual structure of the autobiography by critiquing, changing, and expanding the genre. Her use of fiction- 123 writing techniques such as dialogue, characterization, and thematic development has often led reviewers to categorize her books as autobiographical fiction. Angelou stated in a 1989 interview that she was the only "serious" writer to choose the genre to express herself.

As critic Susan Gilbert states, Angelou reports not one person's story, but the collective's. Scholar Selwyn R. Cudjoe agrees, and views Angelou as representative of the convention in African-American autobiography as a public gesture that spoke for an entire group of people. “I never could tell about white people. Negroes had survived centuries of inhuman treatment and retained their humanity by hoping for the best from their pale-skinned oppressors but at the same time being prepared for the worst” (SS

120).

All of Angelou’s autobiographies conformed to the genre's standard structure: they were written by a single author, they were chronological, and they contained elements of character, technique, and theme. In a 1983 interview with African-

American literature critic Claudia Tate, Angelou calls her books autobiographies.

When speaking of her unique use of the genre, Angelou acknowledges that she has followed the slave narrative tradition of "speaking in the first-person singular talking about the first-person plural, always saying I meaning 'we'".

Angelou recognizes that there are fictional aspects to all her books; she tended to "diverge from the conventional notion of autobiography as truth". Her approach paralleled the conventions of many African-American autobiographies written during the abolitionist period in the US, when truth was often censored for purposes of self- protection. Angelou in the long tradition of African-American autobiography insists that she has created a unique interpretation of the autobiographical form. In a 1998 interview with journalist George Plimpton, Angelou discusses her writing process, and 124

"the sometimes slippery notion of truth in nonfiction" and memoirs. When asked if she changed the truth to improve her story, she stated, "Sometimes I make a diameter from a composite of three or four people, because the essence in only one person is not sufficiently strong to be written about"(Woodard 80).

Although Angelou has never admitted to changing fact in her stories, she has used the facts to make an impact with the reader. One can assume that 'the essence of the data' is present in Angelou's work is true to itself. Angelou "fictionalizes, to enhance interest". Angelou's long-time editor, Robert Loomis, agrees, stating that she could rewrite any of her books by changing the order of her facts to make a different impact on the reader. A statement that had great currency in the neighbourhood warned:

Be careful of white women with coloured men. They might marry and

bear children, but when they get what they want out of the men, they

leave their children and go back to their own people. We are all so

cruelly comprehensively educated by our tribal myths that it did not

occur to me to question what it was that white women wanted out of the

men. Since few Negro men in the interracial marriages I had seen had a

substantial amount of money, and since the women could have had the

sex without the marriage, and since mothers leave their children so

rarely that an incident of child abandonment is cause for a newspaper

story, it followed that the logic of the warning did not hold. (SS 124)

In Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas, Angelou utilizes repetition as a literary technique. For example, she leaves her child in the care of his grandmother, just as her own mother left her and her older brother in the care of their grandmother in Caged Bird. Much of Singin' and Swingin′ delves into Angelou's guilt 125 about accepting work that forces her to separate from her young son. As Angelou's friend, scholar Dolly McPherson states, "The saddest part of Singin' and Swingin' is the young Guy, who, though deeply loved by Angelou, seems to be shoved into the background whenever a need to satisfy her monetary requirements or theatrical ambitions arises"(SS 87). Despite her great success traveling Europe with the Porgy and Bess tour, she is distressed and full of indecision. For every positive description of her European experiences, there is a lament about Guy that "shuts off" these experiences and prevents her from enjoying the fruit of her hard work.

Travel is a common theme in American autobiography as a whole; as

McPherson states, it is something of a national myth to Americans as a people. This is also the case for African American autobiography, which has its roots in the slave narrative. Like those narratives that focus on the writers' search for freedom from bondage, modern African American autobiographers like Angelou seek to develop "an authentic self" and the freedom to find it in their community. The journey to a distant goal, the return home, and the quest which involves the voyage out, achievement, and return are typical patterns in Black autobiography.

For Angelou, this quest takes her from her childhood and adolescence, as described in her first two books, into the adult world. Singin' and Swingin' is a sunny tour of Angelou's twenties, from early years marked by disappointments and humiliation, into the broader world—to the white world and to the international community. This period describes years of joy, as well as the start of Angelou's great success and fulfilment as an entertainer. Not all is "merry like Christmas", however; the book is also marked by negative events: her painful marriage and divorce, the death of her grandmother, and her long separation from her son. 126

In Angelou's first two volumes, the setting is limited to three places (Arkansas,

Missouri, and California), while in Singin' and Swingin', the "setting breaks open" to include Europe as she travels with the Porgy and BessCompany. Angelou's travel narrative, which takes up approximately 40 percent of the book, gives the book its organized structure, especially compared to Gather Together in My Name, which is more chaotic. Angelou's observations about race, gender, and class serve to make the book more than a simple travel narrative. As a Black American, her travels around the world put her in contact with many nationalities and classes, expand her experiences beyond her familiar circle of community and family, and complicate her understandings of race relations.

In Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas, Angelou continues an examination of her experiences with discrimination, begun in her first two volumes.

The major problem of her works explores the sufferings and survival of the Black female in America". Singin' and Swingin' is divided into two parts; in the first part,

Angelou works out her relationships with the white world, and in the second part, she evaluates her interactions with fellow Black cast members in Porgy and Bess, as well as her encounters with Europe and Africa.

In this third autobiography, Angelou is placed in circumstances that force her to change her opinions about whites, not an easy change for her. Louise Cox, the co- owner of the record store she frequents on Fillmore Street, generously offers Angelou employment and friendship. Angelou marries a white man, whose appreciation of

Black music breaks her stereotype of whites. This is a difficult decision for Angelou, and she justifies it by rationalizing that Tosh is Greek, and not an American white. She was not marrying one of the enemy, but she could not escape the embarrassment and shame when they encountered other Blacks. Later, she has a friendship among equals 127 with her white co-workers, Jorie, Don, and Barrie, who assist her job quest at The

Purple Onion. This free and equal relationship is significant to her in that it represents an important stage of her evolution toward adulthood.

Angelou's experiences with the Porgy and Bess tour expands her understanding of other races and race relations as she meets people of different nationalities during her travels. All these experiences are instrumental in Angelou's movement toward adulthood and serve as a basis for her later acceptance and tolerance of other races.

Porgy and Bess have had a controversial history; many in the African American community consider it racist in its portrayal of Blacks. Angelou mentioned none of this controversy in Singin' and Swingin', however.

Music appears throughout Angelou's third autobiography, starting with the title, which evokes a blues song and references the beginnings of Angelou's career in music and performance. The autobiography begins with the statement, “Music was my refuge.

I could crawl into the spaces between the notes and curl my back to loneliness” (SS 1).

She starts Singin' and Swingin' the same way she starts Caged Bird: with an epigraph to set the tone. Here, the epigraph is a quotation from an unidentified three-line stanza in classic blues form. After the epigraph, "music" is the first word in the book. As the story opens, a lonely Angelou finds solace in Black music, and is soon hired as a salesgirl in a record store on Fillmore Street in San Francisco. She meets and falls in love with her first husband after she discovers their shared appreciation of Black music.

After learning of her grandmother's death, her reaction, "a dazzling passage three paragraphs long" according to Mary Jane Lupton, is musical; not only does it rely upon gospel tradition, but is also influenced by African American literary texts, especially

James Weldon Johnson's"Go Down Death—A Funeral Sermon". 128

After her divorce, Angelou earns a living for herself and her son with music and dance; this decision marks a turning point in her life. Angelou's new career seems, as

Hagen asserts, to be propelled by a series of parties, evoking the title of this book.

Hagen also calls her tour with Porgy and Bess"the biggest party by far of the book".

McPherson calls Singin' and Swingin'"Angelou's praisesong" to the opera. Angelou has

"fallen hopelessly in love with the musical", even turning down other job offers to tour with its European company. Porgy and Bessis regarded as an antagonist that enthralls

Angelou, beckoning and seducing her away from her responsibilities. It is Angelou's foundation for her later performances in dance, theatre, and song.

Conflict, or Angelou's presentation of opposites, is another theme in Singin' and

Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas. Angelou constructs a plot by mixing opposing incidences and attitudes - Angelou's "dialectical method". The book is full of conflicts: in Angelou's marriage, her feelings between being a good mother and a successful performer, the stereotypes about other races, and her new experiences with whites. This presentation of conflict is what makes Angelou's writing "brilliant"; she finds that the strength of Singin' and Swingin' comes, in part, from Angelou's duplication of conflicts underlying the plot, characters, and thought patterns in the book.

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 lesser extent, in Angelou's other volumes. Even the closing sentence of the book ("Although I was not a great singer

I was his mother, and he was my wonderful, dependently independent son") demonstrates Angelou's dialectical construction, sums up the contradictions of

Angelou's character, and alludes to mother/son patterns in her later books. 129

Motherhood is a "prevailing theme" throughout Angelou's autobiographies.

Angelou presents a rare kind of literary model, the working mother. Beginning in

Caged Bird, when she gives birth to her son, the emphasis Angelou places on this theme increases in importance. Angelou finds herself in a situation very familiar to mothers with careers, and is forced to choose between being a loving mother or a fully realized person. In this book Angelou sheds the image of "unwed mother" with "a dead- end destiny" that had followed her throughout her previous autobiography.

Angelou's need for security for her young son motivates her choices in Singin' and Swingin', especially her decision to marry Tosh Angelos. She feels a deep sense of guilt and regret when she has to leave her son to tour with Porgy and Bess, which prevents her from fully enjoying the experience. In spite of this, Singin' and Swingin' has been called "a love song to Angelou's son". Just as she changes her name as the story progresses, so does Guy, who becomes an intelligent, sensitive boy in the pages of this book. As Guy grows, so does his mother.

When Angelou discovers how deeply their separation injures Guy, she leaves the Porgy and Bess tour before it ends, at great personal cost. By the end of the book, their bond is deepened and she promises never to leave him again. Maya embraces the importance of motherhood, just as she had done at the end of her previous autobiographies. Angelou comes into intimate contact with whites for the first time— whites who are very different from the racist people whom she encounters in her childhood. She discovers that her stereotypes of Whites were developed to protect herself from their cruelty and indifference.

Conditioned by earlier experiences, Angelou distrusts everyone, especially whites. Nevertheless, she is repeatedly surprised by the kindness and goodwill of many whites she meets, and, thus, her suspicions begin to soften into understanding". In 130

Singin' and Swingin', Angelou effectively demonstrates the inviolability of the African

American personhood, as well as her own closely guarded defence of it. In order for her to have any positive relationships with whites and people of other races, however,

Angelou examines and discard her stereotypical views about Whites.

Thus Angelou re-examines her lingering prejudices when faced with the broader world full of whites. However, this is a complex process, since most of

Angelou's experiences with whites are positive during this time. The book's main protagonist, Angelou moves between the white and Black worlds, both defining herself as a member of her community and encountering whites in a much fuller, more sensuous manner.

The real problem in America is between black and white. Both see themselves as warriors. Black men talk about change when what they really mean is exchange.

They want to take over the positions of power of white man have. In the United States, race and sex have always been overlapping discourses, a fact that has its origins in slavery. Angelou asserts that the profound impact of rape is best understood in the context of rape as a crime against the person. She correctly depicts rape and cruelty as a political act by which men attempt to assert their domination over women which she focuses in all her autobiographies.

Such effective use of autobiography in consciousness-raising broke what, in retrospect, seems a remarkable silence about a pervasive aspect of the young female experience. It also effectively led to subsequent strategies for change, ranging from feminist self-help methods of rape crisis centres to reform of the criminal justice and medical care systems. Because the black child is burdened by the cultural and domestic conspiracy of silence in matters regarding the sexual violation of juveniles, it was to be 131 decades before Angelou could disclose in writing the pain she experienced in the episode.

Nevertheless, her honest portrayal of the rape (her sensitivity to the victim at a time when rape victims were generally believed to have seduced their attackers), and her political decision to expose how black males, in the cruellest game of power, violate black females as if they were mere ciphers, making even heavier the crosses they bear, emphasise her courage and initiative as a writer. Angelou poignantly portrays the victim’s psychological landscape: first, her need for parental love and intimacy, and later her confusion, guilt and fear.

Even more importantly, Angelou’s testimony challenges the practice of suppressing gender in the name of the broader racial concerns, as was in both Civil

Rights and the Black Power Movements. Her analytical grasp of the position of the black woman, based on her childhood trauma, has made her an important spokesperson for second-wave feminism. More importantly, she has spearheaded the rebellion of

African-American women against male oppressors by pointing to the complex causes rather than to the camouflage of oppression.

To sum up, in these three autobiographies I Know Why the Caged Birds Sing,

Gather Together in my Name and Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like

Christmas, Angelou asserts that the black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time that she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and black lack of power. The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance. Chapter IV

Sufferings and Survival: A Study of Maya Angelou’s The Heart of a Women and All God’s Children need Travelling Shoes

The history of Afro-American autobiography is long and full. In America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, thousands of former slaves set down the history of their escape from bondage into freedom in writings which came to be called “slave narratives” and to be identified as an independent literary genre. The first of these was printed in 1705 and the last was Booker T. Washington’s memorable Up from Slavery

(1901). However, the genre was further expanded by the addition of over 2,000 oral narratives. The narratives with former slaves which were conducted as part of the

Federal Writer’s Project of the Works Progress Administration and collected in over

10,000 pages in the Library of Congress.

The written and oral autobiographical narratives may be considered antecedents for two differing modes within the rich genre of black autobiography, with Davis

Autobiography and Shaw’s reflections of his eighty-six years being the modern-day descendants of the two modes. The emotional drive of the written narrative, as with traditional church testimonial, is toward the reader or listener, whereas the impact of the oral narrative, as with traditional blues, is first upon the individual writer or singer himself; the former assumes an external community, whereas the latter seeks to create a community through the sharing of psychic experiences in the process of their articulation. Black autobiography then, has a testimonial as well as a blues mode.

In both the written and the oral autobiographies, however, the individual discovers himself to be and describes himself as a member of the black community.

Traditional autobiography, called “a distinctive product of Western post-Roman civilization” (Pascal 180), focuses emphatically upon the individual, although Stephen 133

Spender notes that even the autobiographical confession is from “Subject to Object, from the individual to the community or creed”(69). Characteristic of the black autobiography, however, is the fact that the individual and the community are not polarities; there is a community of fundamental identification between “I” and “We” within any single autobiography in spite of differences in autobiographical modes in the autobiographer’s vision.

St. Claire Drake maintains:

The genre [of the Afro-American autobiography] is one in which more

intimate aspects of the autobiographer’s personal experience are

subordinated to social commentary and reflections upon what it means

to be a Negro in a world dominated by white men. There have been not

black Marcel Prousts and Andre’ Gides. The traumatic effects of the

black experience seem to have made confessional writing, an intellectual

luxury black writers cannot afford. (156)

The written slave narrative, however, and those autobiographies of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries written in a similar mode seek explicitly to change the destiny of the community. As in a traditional church testimonial, the intention of the autobiographer’s description of his experience of conversion and salvation in these works is to bring his audience to a like conversion and salvation; consequently the particular facts of personal experience are generalized through logic or exaggeration, so that listeners or readers may readily grasp their significance.

The revelations of slave narratives and their autobiographical successors also have the tone of urgency typical of testimonials: “Be Saved or Perish in Hell; Find

Freedom or Die in Slavery” (Stone 113). The apparent intention of the testimonial autobiography thus seems to be to make the experiences of a personal history felt with 134 revolutionary impact upon the present and the future. The general theme of the slave narratives, as Arna Bontemps explains, is “the fetters of mankind and the yearning of all living things for freedom” (190). Their specific theme, however, is the abolition of slavery, and as a result, they were widely used in the nineteenth century in support of the Abolition Movement. Through eyewitness accounts or the accounts of firsthand experiences, through practical polemics or impassioned rhetoric, the autobiographer’s conviction remains the same as that of former slave Gustavus Vassa who concluded his

Life (1789) with the following very simple, very powerful words: “The abolition of slavery would be an universal good”(192).

At the outset of the black autobiographies, the testimonial writer is fully conscious of his conclusion, with each subsequent description or argument being used as evidence to contribute to the final irrefutability of his initial premise; the writer, in reflecting on his slave past, can view that past only from the perspective of his own freedom for his brothers and sisters. Thus the horrors of slavery overshadow even their early memories of their beautiful African homeland and his gracious tribal life; in the testimonial autobiography, the end is truly in the beginning, for the tone of urgency must be sustained through the work and beyond

Autobiography holds a deep fascination for people of all ages, races and sexes.

The success of this genre is attributed to curiosity about each other’s lives. Once upon a time, national leaders, politicians, film stars and prisoners of war wrote stories of their struggles, sufferings and achievements. All they needed was a good story line spiced with laughter, tears, defeat, success etc, the ability to tell the story, to make the mundane sound interesting and a flair for the language. Though autobiographies are not works of imagination, many suffered from sensationalism, exaggeration or understatement. For long, autobiography was considered as a sub-genre in literature. 135

Today, it has been recognized as a major form and the most instructive form in which understanding of life confront us. Writing autobiography is an act of empowerment, a way of struggling to take control of one’s existence through the command of the world. An autobiographer seeks liberation through the creative act of writing. The most pervasive reason for writing autobiography is the desire to demonstrate one’s freedom in and through oral or written story-telling. Discussing the ontology of autobiography, William Andrews states that “the writing of autobiography is in some ways uniquely self-liberating, the final climatic act in the drama of the quest for freedom” (Estes-Hicks 17).

Autobiography privileges the individual as it chronicles the development of the

‘I’. The ‘I’ grows as it progresses through a traditional quest pattern and goes in search of experience that allows him/her to become a person; in short, it is an account of

‘becoming’. Black or Afro-American autobiography holds a unique position. It differs vastly from the white autobiography. The white narratives invariably feature an individual forging a career, a reputation or business. Generally they are success stories, reflections on how to reach the top, achieve power, wealth and fame.

Black autobiography is mostly anguished groping for identity for those who are caught in a rootless limbo. It tries to solve the dilemma of the split self and find an answer to the “cultural schizophrenia” (Braxton 89) of the African-Americans. It is written to make their folk avoid becoming an emasculated tool of the whites in power.

Black autobiography debunks the stereotype about blacks and asserts blackness as a positive cultural tradition. It insists that they accept their blackness as a subject of pride. Black autobiography asserts an elemental human right to live and grow. It is “a bid for freedom, a beak of hope cracking the shell of slavery and exploitation. It is also an attempt to communicate to the white world what whites have done” (Butterfield 3). 136

Black autobiography though distils the story of the self, represents more than individual experience. In it, we find the collective self, the sense of cultural definition.

Such autobiography is presented as representative or reflective of a group, at the same time, the narrator as an individual and his/her pride in an inimitable self comes through strong and clear. In some cases, the individual predicament of the writer as autobiographical subject dissolves into the collective predicament of the community.

Here the individual and the community are not separate entities. The writer breaks down the difference between ‘I’ and ‘we’. The voice of the individual becomes the voice of the community. This thread of communal responsibility runs through all Black autobiographies.

Butterfield enumerates the central tenets of Black autobiography as “the identity crisis, alienation, the restless movement” and a particular set of “views on education, knowledge and resistance” (155). Poised on the threshold of the present, the Black autobiographers look back and articulate the collective trauma, making their works markers that corroborate memory. But there lies the danger of reading history backwards instead of going narratives of this kind. As Stephen Butterfield says, “To read closely what they have to say, to allow their message entry into the blood stream and vital nerve centres, is to look the monster of slavery and racism full in the face, to confront it nakedly without the shield of interpretation by white historians” (4). But in a way, the slave narratives can be said to be an early form of protest literature and in them, we find the genesis of black autobiography.

Most of the slave narratives in the eighteenth century were tales of escape from bondage into freedom, of their fight to be recognized as human beings. Some of them became a powerful and convincing testimony of human endurance, intelligence and love amidst tyranny. To the slaves, education coupled with physical resistance was the 137 path towards freedom. Hence they juxtaposed these two themes in their narratives. The slave narratives sum up their struggles to have a life where love, honour, loyalty and freedom are possible and not just a dream. William and Ellen Craft, Nat Turner,

Solomon Northrop, W.W. Brown, Fredrick Douglas and Booker T. Washington wrote the finest examples of slave narratives.

Civil war had brought an end to slavery and the Blacks were free. But still, they had no legal rights. Moreover “the Slave system was merely replaced with the race system. . . . The Black American though he was no longer three-fifth of a human being, was only three-fifth if a citizen” (Smith 28). The quest for identity became the most important factor for Black autobiographers. The Black male autobiographer

“disencumbered’ from the old social and self-directed unit who could assume command of his life. This disencumbering or this process of individuation generally takes place within and internalized nexus of family relations developing in stages and in terms of conflict, power separation and dominance”(Foster 100).

The Black women autobiography is a site for reconstituting and re-enacting racialized and gendered social and cultural histories. The ‘double burden’ suffered by

Black women has worked to their advantage, “whereas the burdens of poor African-

American men have always been oppressive, dispiriting, demoralizing and soul-killing, those of women have always been, at least partly generative, empowering and humanizing” (Patterson 11). The Black male writers like W.E.B. Dubois, J. Saunders

Redding, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay and Richard Wright developed autobiography into cultural and literary form. The central motive of Black autobiography moved from desegregation to socialism in the works of Langston

Hughes and Claude McKay. 138

Later Black autobiography was greatly influenced by Black music especially the spirituals and Blues that it distinctly veered towards aestheticism. Soon Black autobiography ceased to be purely political and became highly personalized. Baldwin,

Eldridge Cleaver, Malcolm X and Julius Lester being “Revolutionist writers” heralded a new wave of Black autobiography. Therefore, to the Black male writers, autobiography is “both an arsenal and a battlefield” (Butterfield 284).

Ida Wells, Anne Moody and Maya Angelou figure prominently in the women autobiographical scene. Ida Well’s Crusade for Justice (1928) is a slave narrative. It is also a historical memoir where we are presented with the story of the author and of her times. Zora Neale Hurston’s autobiography Dust Track on the Roads (1942) attracted critical attention. The Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968) shows Anne Moody as a revolutionary who defends the rights of Blacks. Gwendolyn Brooks made an excursion into autobiographical novel with Report from Part One (1927). Ida Wells and Anne

Moody were aggressive writers and ardent advocates of Black womanhood.

A series of five autobiographies established Maya Angelou’s fame as a writer.

She differed from the other women writers in style and approach. Although protest and social commentary run through Angelou’s works, political ideology is distinctly absent.

Her autobiographies carry a core of resistance to emotional and physical oppression and a will to discover a path of survival. “The major theme embodied in the five volumes is not betrayal and disillusionment but rebirth and regeneration and the end of alienation” (McPherson 15).

As a Black, Maya Angelou had her share of pain, insult, humiliation and disappointment. She has fought against defeat and denigration, against the dying of the light. It is her unfailing capacity to see the positive side of life that has spurred her on the rise above even the most difficult situation. As Dolly McPherson states, “In Maya 139

Angelou’s vision, both with respect to the Black community and to herself, what is consistently in focus is the attempt to preserve and celebrate humanity in the face of seemingly impossible odds” (39).The reality of her life conflicts with the lies of the movies and fiction. Hence, Maya Angelou did not want to be invented by somebody.

Debunking the racist image invented by the whites, she invents herself, her identity. As her editor Robert Loomis said, “Maya is her books” (Elliot VII).

Maya’s journey transcends the national circuit as she ascends to an international space. In her autobiography, the maturation of consciousness parallels geographical movement. This journey to Africa is a reverse journey but the sojourner has come a long way from her shackled commodified ancestors. She journey’s into Africa as an

Afro-American shouldering her past. She realizes that she can never become an African again; her past is too ingratiated in the psyche to relinquish that identity. She once again willingly takes the route of Middle Passage in getting back to America, thereby authenticating and attesting the identity of the New Black American Woman.

The metamorphosis that occurred in the life of the prototypical black woman is phenomenal. Lupton M.J., rightly comments:

Angelou’s journey from Africa back to America is in certain ways a

restatement of the historical phase known as the mid-passage. . .

Angelou shares 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 autobiography itself. (163)

The women autobiographers are concerned with identification, interdependence and community. The Heart of a Woman (1981) is an autobiography by American writer

Maya Angelou. The book is the fourth instalment in Angelou's series of seven autobiographies. The Heart of a Woman recounts events in Angelou's life between 1957 140 and 1962 and follows her travels to California, New York City, Cairo and Ghana as she raises her teenage son, becomes a published author, becomes active in the US Civil

Rights Movement, and becomes romantically involved with a South African freedom fighter. One of the most important themes of The Heart of a Woman is motherhood, as

Angelou continues to raise her teenage son. The book ends with Angelou's son leaving for college and Angelou looking forward to newfound independence and freedom.

The Heart of a Woman, the fourth in the autobiographical series gives an account of her son’s youth, though every now and then, it goes back to her childhood.

The similarities between her own and her son’s childhood make Neubauer comment,

“Maya Angelou’s overwhelming sense of displacement and instability is ironically her son’s burden too” (124). Though the main focus is on the personal life, this work is political too, as it is set against the political upsurge of Africans and Afro-Americans between 1957 and 1962. Angelou herself is involved in the rising Civil Rights

Movement and the African liberation struggle.

This work begins in Harlem in 1957 where Angelou joins the Harlem Writers

Guild. It traces her growing consciousness as a woman, and also the change in the contours of Black people’s struggle, which has now become an international issue. On the personal level, Angelou and her son face a condition of displacement both familial and geographical. The tension between mothering and working continues to a lesser extent. Here the conflict is external, showing Angelou as a strong, aggressive Black mother rather than as a mother torn by self-doubt. It shows how she confronts Jerry, a gang leader when her son gets into trouble with a Brooklyn street gang. Unfortunately, her son’s serious injury in a car accident makes her face the most tormented period of her life. 141

The process of physical healing brings in great autonomy to her son. His entrance into the University of Ghana and his attempt to wrest control of his life from his mother, set the tone for their future relationship and make Angelou realize that a new social self is emerging in her also. Though she is left ‘alone’, the promoting aspect is, she is free to be ‘herself’. She is no longer defined as a grand-daughter, daughter or mother. Now she is a woman free to choose her life and she begins her account of ‘self’ as writer and strengthens her public identity too.

Like Angelou's previous volumes, the book has been described as autobiographical fiction, though most critics, as well as Angelou, have characterized it as autobiography. The Heart of a Woman has received positive reviews. It was chosen as an Oprah’s Book Club selection in 1997.Critic Mary Jane Lupton says it has "a narrative structure unsurpassed in American autobiography" (2) and that it is Angelou's most introspective autobiography. The title is taken from a poem by Harlem

Renaissance, poet Georgia Douglas Johnson, which connects Angelou with other female African-American writers. Another critic Lyman B. Hagen states, "Faithful to the ongoing themes of survival, sense of self, and continuing education, The Heart of a

Woman moves its central figures to a point of full personhood" (3). The book follows

Angelou to several places in the US and Africa, but the most important journey she describes is a voyage into the self.

The Heart of a Woman, published in 1981, is the fourth installment of Maya

Angelou’s series of seven autobiographies. The success of her previous autobiographies and the publication of three volumes of poetry had brought Angelou a considerable amount of fame by 1981.Angelou's work set a precedent not only for other Black women writers, but for the genre of autobiography as a whole. Angelou had become recognized and highly respected as a spokesperson for Blacks and women through the 142 writing of her life stories. It made her, without a doubt America's most visible black woman autobiographer. Angelou was one of the first African-American female writers to publicly discuss her personal life, and one of the first to use herself as a central character in her books. She was called as a pioneer of self-exposure, willing to focus honestly on the more negative aspects of her personality and choices.

The title is taken from the poem:

The heart of a woman goes forth with the dawn,

As a lone bird, soft winging, so restlessly on,

Afar o'er life's turrets and vales does it roam

In the wake of those echoes the heart calls home.

The heart of a woman falls back with the night,

And enters some alien cage in its plight,

And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars

While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.

"The Heart of a Woman", by Georgia Douglas Johnson.

The title suggests Angelou's painful loneliness and exposes a spiritual dilemma.

Angelou has stated that she always admired women writers like Anne Spencer, Jessie

Fauset, Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston. Her choice of title for this book is an acknowledgment of her legacy as a Black woman writer.

In this novel, Maya continues her account of her son’s youth and, in the process, repeatedly return to the story of her childhood. The references to her childhood serve partly to create a textual link for readers who might be unfamiliar with the earlier volumes and partly to emphasize the suggestive similarities between her childhood and her son’s burden too. In a brief flashback in the second chapter, she reminds us of the displacement that characterized her youth and links this aspect of her past with her 143 son’s present attitude. When Guy is fourteen, Angelou decides to move to New York.

She does not bring Guy to the East until she has found a place for them to live, and when he arrives after a one-month separation, he initially resists her attempts to make a new home for them:

The air between us [Angelou and Guy] was burdened with his aloof of

scorn. I understood him too well. When I was three my parents divorced

in Long Beach, California, and sent me and my four-year old brother,

unescorted, to our paternal grandmother. We wore wrist tags which

informed anyone concerned that we were Marguerite and Bailey

Johnson, en route to Mrs. Annie Henderson in Stamps, Arkansas. Except

for disastrous and mercifully brief encounters with each of them when I

was seven, we didn’t see our parents again until I was thirteen. (HW 45)

From this similar encounters with Guy, Angelou learns that the continual displacement of her own childhood is something she cannot prevent from recurring in her son’s life.

In New York, Angelou begins to work as the Northern coordinator of the

Southern Christian Leadership Conference and devotes most of her time to raising funds, boosting membership, and organizing volunteer labour, both in the office and in the neighbourhoods. Throughout Heart of a Woman, she expands her own narrative by including anecdotes about well-known entertainers and political figures. Her account of her visit with Martin Luther King, Jr., at her SCLC office is just one example of this autobiographical technique. When Dr. King pays his first visit to the New York office during her tenure, she does not have advance notice of his presence and rushes into her office one day after lunch to find him sitting at her desk. They begin to talk about her background and eventually focus their comments on her brother, Bailey: 144

He was friendly and understanding, but if I told him my brother was in

prison, I couldn’t be sure how long his understanding would last. I could

lose my job. Even more important, I might lose his respect. Birds of a

feather and all that, but I took a chance and told him Bailey was in Sing

Sing. He dropped his head and looked at his hands… (HW 65)

Angelou appreciates King’s sympathy and of course shares his hope that their work will make the world more fair and free. She recognizes the undeniable effects of displacement on Bailey’s life and fervently hopes that her own son will be spared any further humiliation and rejection. She states:

I understand. Disappointment drives young men to some desperate

lengths. Sympathy and sadness kept his voice low. That’s why we must

fight and win. We must save the Bailey’s of the world. And Maya, never

stop loving him. Never give up on him. Never deny him. And

remember, he is freer than those who hold him behind bars. (HW 78)

Angelou describes her work for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr,’s Southern Christian

Leadership Conference in The Heart of a Woman. The events described in The Heart of a Woman take place between 1957 and 1962, beginning shortly after the end of

Angelou's previous autobiography, Singin and Swingin and Getting Merry like

Christmas. Angelou and her teenage son Guy have moved into a houseboat commune in Sausalito. After a year, they move to a rented house near San Francisco. Singer

Billie Holiday visits Angelou and her son there and Holiday sings "Strange Fruit”, her famous song about the lynching of Black men, to Guy. Holiday tells Angelou, "You're going to be famous. But it won't be for singing" (HW 10).

In 1959, Angelou and Guy move to New York City. The transition is difficult for Guy, and Angelou is forced to protect him from a gang leader. No longer satisfied 145 with performing in nightclubs, she dedicates herself to acting, writing, political organizing, and her son. Her friend, novelist John Killens, invites her to join the

Harlem Writers Guild. She meets other important African-American artists and writers, including James Baldwin, who would become her mentor. She becomes a published writer for the first time.

Angelou becomes more politically active and participates in African-American and African protest rallies, including helping to organize a sit-in at the United Nations following the death of Zaire’s Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba. She meets Malcolm

X and is struck by his good looks and magnetism. After hearing Martin Luther King, Jr. speak, she and her friend activist Godfrey Cambridge are inspired to produce a successful fundraising event for King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference

(SCLC) called Cabaret For Freedom. King names her coordinator of SCLC's office in

New York. She performs in Jean Genet’s play,'s play The Blacks.

From time to time, Angelou sees marriage as the answer to her own sense of dislocation and fully envisions a perfect future with various prospective husbands.

While in New York, she meets Vusumzi Make, a black South African freedom fighter, and imagines that he will provide her with the same domestic security she had hoped would develop from other relationships: “I was getting a husband, and a part of that gift was having someone to share responsibility and guilt”(HW 55). Yet her hopes are even more idealistic than usual, in as much as she imagines herself participating in the liberation of South Africa as Vus Make’s wife: “with my courage added his own, he would succeed in bringing the ignominious white rule in South Africa to an end. If I didn’t already have the qualities he needed, then I would just develop them. Infatuation made me believe in my ability to create myself into my lover’s desire” (HW 89). 146

In reality, Angelou is only willing to go so far in re-creating herself to meet her husband’s desires and is all too soon frustrated with her role as Make’s wife. He does not want her to work but is unable on his own to support his expensive tastes as well as his family. They are evicted from their New York apartment just before they leave for

Egypt and soon face similar problems in Cairo. Their marriage dissolves after some months, despite Angelou’s efforts to contribute to their financial assets by working as editor of the Arab Observer. In this novel, she underscores the illusory nature of her fantasy about marriage to show how her perspective has shifter over the years and how much understanding she has gained about life in general. Re-creating these fantasies in her autobiography is a subtle form of truth telling and a way to present hard-earned insights about her life to her readers.

In 1961, Angelou meets South African freedom fighter Vusumzi Make.

Angelou and Make never marry, but she and Guy move with Make to London and

Cairo, where she acts as his political wife while he was in exile. Their relationship is full of cultural conflicts; he expects her to be a subservient African wife, and she yearns for the freedom of a working woman. She learns that Make is too friendly with other women and is irresponsible with money, so she accepts a position as assistant editor at the Arab Observer. Their relationship is examined by their community of friends, and

Angelou and Make eventually separate. Angelou accepts a job in Liberia, and she and

Guy travel to Accra, where he has been accepted to attend college. Guy is seriously injured in an automobile accident, so she begins working at the University of Ghana and remains there while he recuperates. The Heart of a Woman ends with Guy leaving for college and Angelou remarking to herself, "At last, I'll be able to eat the whole breast of a roast chicken by myself" (HW 45). 147

All seven of Angelou's installments of her life story are in the tradition of

African-American autobiography. Starting with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,

Angelou challenges the usual structure of the autobiography by critiquing, changing, and expanding the genre. Angelou said in 1989 that she is the only serious writer to choose autobiography to express herself, but she reports not one person's story, but the collective's. Angelou is a representative of the convention in African-American autobiography as a public gesture that speaks for an entire group of people. Her use of devices common in fictional writing, such as dialog, characterization and thematic development has led some reviewers to categorize her books as autobiographical fiction.

All of Angelou's autobiographies conform to the autobiography's standard structure: they are written by a single author, they are chronological, and they contain elements of character, technique, and theme. In a 1983 interview with literature critic

Claudia Tate, Angelou calls her books autobiographies, and later acknowledges that she follows the slave narrative tradition of "speaking in the first-person singular talking about the first-person plural, always saying 'I' meaning 'we'"( HW 67). Lupton compares The Heart of a Woman with other autobiographies, and states that for the first time in Angelou's series, she is able to present herself as a model for successful living.

However, Angelou's "woman's heart"—her perspective as a woman with concerns about her self-esteem and the conflicts with her lovers and her son—is what makes her autobiography different.

Angelou recognizes that there are fictional aspects to all her books, which differentiate her work from more traditional "truthful" autobiographies. Her approach parallels the conventions of many African-American autobiographies written during the abolitionist period in the US, when truth was often censored for purposes of self- 148 protection. Angelou in the tradition of African-American autobiography, has created a unique interpretation of the autobiographical form. In a 1998 interview with journalist

George Plimpton, Angelou discusses her writing process, and "the sometimes slippery notion of truth in nonfiction" and memoirs. When asked if she changed the truth to improve her story, she states, "Sometimes I make a diameter from a composite of three or four people, because the essence in only one person is not sufficiently strong to be written about"(33). Angelou has never admitted to changing the facts in her stories.

Hagen states, "One can assume that 'the essence of the data' is present in Angelou's work", and that Angelou uses aspects of fiction writing to make her depictions of events and people more interesting. Angelou's long-time editor, Robert Loomis said that she could rewrite any of her books by changing the order of her facts to make a different impact on the reader.

The Heart of a Woman is similar to Angelou's previous volumes because it is narrated from the intimate point of view of a woman and a mother, but by this time, she is able to refer to events that occurred in her past books. Angelou has become a serial autobiographer, a narrative structure unsurpassed in American autobiography. Angelou successfully draws upon her previous works, and is able to build upon the themes she has already explored; for example, she threatens the gang leader who has been threatening her son, a powerful incident when considered in light of Angelou's rape in I

Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Angelou's violent behaviour is an unconscious effort to rewrite her own history.

Angelou does not begin to create her own narrative until The Heart of a

Woman, which depends less upon the conventions of fiction than her previous books.

For example, there is less dialog and fewer dramatic episodes. The Heart of a Woman is 149 more uplifting than its predecessors due to Angelou's resolution of her conflict between her duties as a mother and her success as a performer.

Angelou perfects the use of the vignette in The Heart of a Woman to present her acquaintances and close associates. Two of her most developed vignettes in this book are of Billie Holiday and Malcolm X. The vignettes of those she knew well, like

Vusumki Make, also present her interactions and relationships. Hagen writes that although "frank talk seemed to be almost requisite for a commercially successful book" in the early 1980s, Angelou values monogamy, fidelity, and commitment in her relationships.

For the only time in this series, Angelou describes her son's accident in detail at both the end of this book and the beginning of her next one, , a technique that centralizes the two books, connects them with each other, creates a strong, emotional link between them, and repeats Angelou's pattern of ending each book on a positive note. In this book, Angelou ends with a hopeful look to the future as her son attains his independence and she looks forward to hers. Hagen writes, "Faithful to the ongoing themes of survival, sense of self, and continuing education, The Heart of a Woman moves its central figures to a point of full personhood" (15).

Race, like in the rest of the series, is a central theme in The Heart of a Woman.

The book opens with Angelou and Guy living in an experimental commune with white people, trying to participate in the new openness between Blacks and whites. She is not completely comfortable with the arrangement; Angelou never names her roommates, even though "naming" has been an important theme in her books thus far. For the most part, Angelou is able to get along well with whites, but she occasionally encounters prejudice, as when she needs help from white friends to rent a home in a segregated neighborhood. Angelou's descriptions of whites and the hopes for eventual equality in 150 this book is optimistic. Angelou continues her indictment of white power structure and her protests against racial injustice.

Angelou becomes more politicized and develops a new sense of Black identity.

Even Angelou's decision to leave show business is political. She sees herself as a social and cultural historian of her time, and of the civil rights and Black literary movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s. She becomes more attracted to the causes of Black militants in the US and in Africa, to the point of entering into a relationship with a significant militant, and becomes more committed to activism. During this time, she becomes an active political protester, but she does not think of herself in that way.

She places the focus upon herself and uses the autobiographical form to demonstrate how the civil rights movement influenced her. Angelou's contributions to civil rights as a fundraiser and SCLC organizer were successful and eminently effective. Travel is a common theme in American autobiography as a whole. This is also the case for African-American autobiography, which has its roots in the slave narrative. The Heart of a Woman has three primary settings—the San Francisco Bay

Area, New York, and Egypt—and two secondary ones—London and Accra.

Like all of Angelou's books, the structure of The Heart of a Woman is based on a journey. Angelou emphasizes the theme of movement by opening her book with a spiritual. ("The ole ark's a moverin'"), which McPherson calls "the theme song of the

United States in 1957"(46). This spiritual, which contains a reference to Noah’s ark, presents Angelou as a type of Noah and demonstrates her spirituality. Angelou mentions Alan Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac’s 1951 novel On the Road, thus connecting her own journey and uncertainty about the future with the journeys of literary figures.

Even though Angelou travels to Africa for a relationship, she makes a connection with the continent. Africa is the site of her growth. Angelou's time in Africa makes her more 151 aware of her African roots as she searches for the past of her ancestors. Although

Angelou journeys to many places in the book, the most important journey she describes is a voyage into the self.

Angelou's primary role in Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like

Christmas was stage performer, but in The Heart of a Woman she changes from someone who uses others' method of expression—the songs and dances of the African,

Caribbean, and African American oral tradition—to a writer. Angelou makes this decision for political reasons as she becomes more involved with the civil rights movement, and so that she can care for her son. For the first time in Angelou's autobiographies, she begins to think of herself as a writer and recounts her literary development. Angelou begins to identify with other Black women writers for the first time in The Heart of a Woman. She has been influenced by several writers since her childhood, but this is the first time she mentions female authors. Up to this point, her identification has been with male writers; her new affiliations with female writers is due to her emerging feminism.

Angelou's concept of herself as an artist changed after her encounter with Billie

Holiday. Up to that point, Angelou's career was more about fame than about art; Als states, "Developing her artistry was not the point"(6). Als also says that Angelou's busy career, instead of revealing her ambition, shows "a woman who is only moderately talented and perpetually unable to understand who she is"(6). Angelou, in spite of the mistakes of her youth, needed the approval and acceptance of others, and observes that

Holiday was able to perceive this. Holiday tells her, "You're going to be famous. But it won't be for singing"(55).

Angelou had begun to write sketches, songs and short stories, and shows her work to her friend John Killens, who invites her to New York City to develop her 152 writing skills. She joins the Harlem Writers Guild, and receives feedback from other

African-American authors such as Killens, Rosa Guy, and Caribbean writer Paule

Marshall, who would eventually make significant contributions to African-American literature. Angelou dedicates herself to improving her craft, forcing herself to understand the technical aspects of writing. Many critics have suggested that readers can actually envision in this volume the distinguished artist who becomes the Maya

Angelou of the 1990s.

Motherhood, a theme throughout Angelou's autobiographies, becomes more complex in The Heart of a Woman. Although Guy struggles with the developmentally appropriate process of adolescent separation from his mother, they remain close. Many years of experience as a mother, and her success as a writer, actress, and activist, enable

Angelou to behave more competently and with more maturity, professionally and as a mother. Her self-assurance becomes a major part of her personality. Her past conflict between her professional and personal lives are resolved, and she fulfills her promise to

Guy she made to him at the end of her previous autobiography that they would never be separated again. Angelou resolves this conflict by subordinating her needs to her child's.

The concept of motherhood is important in Angelou's books, as is the motif of the responsible mother. Angelou's commitment to care for her son is revealed in her confrontation with the street gang leader who has threatened Guy. In this autobiography, Angelou has become a powerful mother. Angelou is no longer torn by self-doubt, but is now a strong and aggressive Black mother. Angelou has become what

Joanne M. Braxton calls the "outraged mother"(4). which represents the Black mother's strength and dedication found throughout slave narratives. Angelou has become a reincarnation of her grandmother. 153

By the end of The Heart of a Woman, Angelou is alone; for example, after Guy recuperates from the car accident, he leaves her to attend college. The final word in the book is the negative "myself", a word that signifies Angelou's new-found freedom and independence. Angelou has become truly herself and is no longer defined as someone's wife or mother. Scholar Wallis Tinnie calls this moment one of "illusive transcendence" and "a scene of hope and completion" (60).

In The Heart of a Woman, Maya Angelou leaves California with her son, Guy, to go to New York. There she enters the society and world of black artists and writers.

Not since her childhood has she lived in an almost black environment, and she is surprised at the obsession her new friends have with the white world around them. She stays for awhile with John and Grace Killens and begins to read her writing at the

Harlem Writers Guild. She continues to sing, most notably at the Apollo Theatre in

Harlem, but more and more she begins to take part in the struggle of black Americans for their rightful place in the world. She helps us organize a benefit cabaret for the

Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and then is appointed Martin Luther King's

Northern Coordinator.

Shortly after that, through her friend Abbey Lincoln, she takes one of the lead parts in Genet's The Blacks, and even writes music for the production. In the meantime, her personal life has taken a tempestuous turn. She has left the New York bail bondsman she was intending to marry and has fallen in love with a South African freedom fighter named Vusumzi Make, who sweeps her off her feet and eventually takes her to London and then to Cairo, where, as her marriage begins to break up, she becomes the first female editor of the English-language magazine.

The Heart of a Woman is filled with unforgettable vignettes of famous people, from Billie Holiday to Malcom X, but perhaps most important is the story of Maya 154

Angelou's relationship with her son. Because this book chronicles, finally, the joys and burdens of a black mother in America and how the son she had cherished so intensely and worked for so devotedly finally grows to be a man. The Heart of a Woman by

Maya Angelou is a memoir detailing the woman's powerful journey from young adulthood in San Francisco to her mid-thirties, mother to a university-aged son, living in Ghana.

The prologue begins with Maya Angelou and a group of others chanting an old spiritual. The author talks about blacks and whites being befuddled. The 1950s and

1960s were a tumultuous time and there were many cases in which people simply did not know which side was up. The time signified many accomplishments for blacks in all areas of society. Angelou came up in a time that was marked by racial tension, oppression, and devastating circumstances for blacks throughout the country. As the daughter of a vivacious, courageous and outspoken mother, it is no wonder that

Angelou would become the powerhouse known throughout the world today.

At the center of Angelou's life throughout the entire book is her son, Guy, civil rights, her devotion to the arts, and the raising up of blacks - black women, in particular. From attending protests and lectures by up and coming activist leaders to throwing herself wholly into activism, Angelou never loses sight of what matters most.

Those activities led to a stint as coordinator of the Southern Christian Leadership

Conference and working with Martin Luther King, Jr. to interactions with Malcolm X and other civil rights leaders.

The author's various activities in the arts community are numerous. Angelou admits that she was a mediocre singer and competent dancer and actress. Those roles propelled her forward and allowed Angelou to tour the world. The real breakthrough came when John Killens urged Angelou to return to New York to become a part of the 155

Harlem Writers Guild. The Guild would help Angelou to harness her natural talent and to hone her craft to present the best possible work. Criticism was hard but valuable.

During this time, Guy grew up. The young man that had been taught to question everything and give respect to those who deserved it made Angelou proud. Guy was intelligent, well spoken, polite, ambitious, and devoted to the same cause his mother worked so hard for in order to eradicate racism worldwide.

The author also details her relationship with Vusumzi Make, a well known

African leader. Vus pursued Angelou relentlessly from their first meeting and would not accept anything less than to have Angelou as his wife. The relationship became rocky due to Vus' irresponsibility and infidelity. Also, Angelou could not bring herself to be what Vus wanted in a typical African wife. Throughout the book, Angelou tells tales of people she encountered along the way. They include Billie Holiday, the Rat

Pack, Ossie Davis, Sidney Poitier, Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, Lou Gosset, Jr., and many others that were famous or blossoming during the era. The book ends with Guy going off to the University of Ghana and leaving Angelou to her own devices for the first time.

A second type of fantasy in Heart of a Woman is borne out in reality rather than in illusion, as is the case with her expectations of marriage. One of the most important uses of the second kind of fantasy involves a sequence that demonstrates how much she fears for Guy’s safety throughout his youth. A few days after mother and son arrive in

Acra, where they move when her marriage with Vus Make deteriorates; some friends invite them to a picnic. Although his mother declines, Guy immediately accepts the invitation in a show of independence. On the way home from the day’s outing, her son is seriously injured in an automobile accident. 156

Even though he had very little experience driving, his intoxicated host asks Guy to drive. When their return is delayed, Angelou is terrified by her recurring fear for

Guy’s safety. Later, in the Korle Bu emergency ward, her familiar fantasy about harm endangering her son’s life moves to the level of reality, as she relates the vulnerability she feels in her role as mother with full responsibility for the well-being of her only child. In a new country, estranged from her husband and with no immediate prospects for employment, she possesses very little control over her life or her son’s safety. After the accident in Ghana, Guy is not only fighting for independence from his mother but also for life itself. The conclusion of TheHeart of Woman, nevertheless, announces a new beginning for Angelou and hope for her future relationship with Guy.

All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes, published in 1986, is the fifth book set between 1962 and 1965, the book begins when Angelou is 33 years old, and recounts the years she lived in Accra, Ghana. The book begins where Angelou's previous book, The Heart of a Woman, ends, with the traumatic car accident involving her son Guy, and ends as Angelou returns to America. The title of the book comes from a Negro spiritual.

As she had begun to do in her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged

Birds Sings, and continued throughout her series, Angelou upholds the long tradition of

African-American autobiography. At the same time she makes a deliberate attempt to challenge the usual structure of the autobiography by critiquing, changing, and expanding the genre. Angelou had matured as a writer by the time she wrote Traveling

Shoes to the point that she was able to play with the form and structure of the work. As in her previous books, it consists of a series of anecdotes connected by theme. She depicts her struggle with being the mother of a grown son, and with her place in her 157 new home. She states, “We were Black Americans in West Africa, where for the first time in our lives the colour of our skin was accepted as correct and normal” (GT 3).

Angelou examines many of the same subjects and themes that her previous autobiographies covered. Although motherhood is an important theme in this book, it does not overwhelm the text as it does in some of her other works. At the end of the book, she ties up the mother/son plot when she leaves her son in Ghana and returns to

America. In most of her works Angelou's explores her African and African-American identities, which is an important theme in Traveling Shoes.

She states:

I had lived with family until my son was born in my sixteenth year.

When he was two months old and perched on my left hip, we left my

mother’s house and together, save for one year when I was touring; we

had been each other’s home and centre for seventeen years. He could die

if he wanted to and go off to wherever dead folks go, but I, I would be

left without a home. (GT 5)

By the end of the book, Angelou comes to term with what scholar Dolly McPherson calls double–consciousness, the parallels and connections between the African and

American parts of her history and character. Racism continues to be an important theme as she learns more about it and about herself. Journey and a sense of home is another important theme in this book; Angelou upholds the African-American tradition of the slave narrative and of her own series of autobiographies. This time she focuses on trying to get home, or on becoming assimilated in African culture, which she finds unattainable.

All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes, published in 1986, is the fifth instalment of Maya Angelou's series of seven autobiographies. The success of 158

Angelou's previous autobiographies and the publication of four volumes of poetry had brought Angelou a considerable amount of fame by 1986.As a writer Angelou was one of the first African-American female writers to publicly discuss her personal life, and one of the first to use herself as a central character in her books, something she continues in Traveling Shoes. Angelou's work sets a precedent not only for other Black women writers, but for the genre of autobiography as a whole.

Angelou’s fifth autobiography focuses primarily on the story of her return to ancestral home in Africa and brings her closer to an acceptance of the distance between the Ghanaians and Black American expatriates. She recognizes the fact “Years of bondage, brutalities, the mixture of other bloods, customs and language had transformed us into an unrecognizable tribe” (GCT 20). The rootlessness of the Afro-

Americans makes her feel envious of those Africans who had remained on the

Continent and retained their culture contact. Once her quest for root is over, she returns to America.

I drank and admitted to a boundless envy of those who remained on the

continent, out of fortune or perfidy. Their countries had been exploited

and their cultures had been discredited by colonialism. Nonetheless, they

could reflect through their priests and chiefs on centuries of continuity.

The lowliest could call the name of ancestors who lived centuries

earlier. The land upon which they lived had been in their people’s

possession beyond remembered time. Despite political bondage and

economic exploitation, they had retained an ineradicable innocence.

(GT 76)

As Cudjoe says, To the Afro-American, Africa remains home, and a sense of continuity, while America remains home, the site of continuity, while America remains 159 home, the site of million humiliations” (30). Angelou frankly admits that they “had only begun to realize in Africa that stars and stripes were one flag and our only flag”

(GCT 127). She affirms her Afro-American identity and speaks highly about her people, “Through centuries of despair and dislocation we had been creative, because we faced down death by daring to hope” (GCT 207). She makes this work, a celebration of hope and a tribute to the magnificent spirit of her people.

Angelou as one of the "pioneers of self-exposure", willing focused on the negative aspects of her personality and choices. For example, while Angelou was composing her second autobiography, Gather Together in My Name, she was concerned about how her readers would react to her disclosure that she had been a prostitute. Her husband Paul Du Feu talked to her into publishing the book by encouraging her to tell the truth as a writer and be honest about it. Through the writing of her life stories Angelou has become recognized and highly respected as a spokesperson for Blacks and women. It made her, as scholar Joanne Braxton has stated,

"Without a doubt. . . . America's most visible black woman autobiographer"(9).

Traveling Shoes is a mixture of Maya Angelou's personal recollection and a historical document of the time in which it is set in the late 1950s. This was the first time that many Black Americans, due to the independence of Ghana and other African states, as well as the emergence of African leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah, were able to view Africa in a positive way. Ghana was the centre of an African cultural renaissance and of Pan Africanism during this time.

The title for the following autobiography is taken from the following poem:

I got shoes, you got shoes

All o' God's chillun got shoes

When I get to heab'n I'm goin' to put on my shoes 160

I'm goin' to walk all ovah God's Heab'n

Heab'n , Heab'n

Ev'rybody talkin' 'bout heab'n ain't goin' dere

Heab'n, Heab'n

I'm goin' to walk all ovah God's Heab'n

According to Angelou, the title of Traveling Shoes comes from spiritual. This shows

Angelou’s ongoing search for a home while being aware of her ultimate home. The title demonstrates Angelou's love of African-American spirituals and deep sense of religion that appears in all of her works. The appearance of the word "traveling" is purposeful, since it emphasizes the journey theme, one of Angelou's most important themes of the book. Like Angelou's previous volumes in her series, the title contributes to its plot and thematic impact

All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes begins as Angelou's previous book,

The Heart of a Woman ends, with her depiction of a serious automobile accident involving her son Guy. After spending two years in Cairo, they come to Accra to enrol

Guy in the University of Ghana, and the accident occurs three days after they arrive.

After Guy's long convalescence, they remain in Ghana, Angelou for four years, from

1962 to 1965. Angelou describes Guy's recovery, including her deep depression. She is confronted by her friend Julian Mayfield, who introduces her to writer and actor Efua

Sutherland, the Director of the National Theatre of Ghana. Sutherland becomes

Angelou's "sister-friend" and allows her to cry out all her pain and bitterness. Angelou states:

I doubted if I, or any Black from the diaspora, could really return to

Africa. We wore skeletons of old despair like necklaces, heralding our

arrival, and we are branded with cynicism. In America we danced, 161

laughed, procreated; we became lawyers, judges, legislators, teachers,

doctors and preachers, but as always, under our glorious costumes we

carried the badge of a barbarous history sewn to our dark skins. It had

often been said that Black people were childish, but in America we had

matured without ever experiencing the true abandon of adolescence.

(GT 77)

Angelou finds a job at the University of Ghana and "falls in love" with Ghana and with its people, who remind her of African-Americans she knew in Arkansas and California.

As the parent of an adult, she experiences new freedoms, respects Guy's choices, and consciously stops making her son the centre of her life. She creates new friendships with her roommates and native Africans, both male and female. She becomes part of a group of American expatriates whom she calls the "Revolutionist Returnees", people like Mayfield and his wife Ana Livia, who share her struggles.

Angelou strengthens her ties with Africa while traveling through eastern

Ghanaian villages, and through her relationships with several Africans. She describes a few romantic prospects, one of which is with a man who proposes that she become his

"second wife" and accepts West African customs. She also becomes a supporter of

Ghana president Kwame Nkrumah and close friends with tribal leader Nana Nketsia and poet Kwesi Brew. During one of her travels through West Africa, a woman identifies her as a member of the Bambara tribe based solely upon her appearance and behaviour, which helps Angelou discover the similarities between her American traditions and those of her ancestors.

As the Black American community trembled beneath the weight of

unprovable innocence, the investigation progressed in all directions.

Suspects were imprisoned, and rumours flew like poison arrows around 162

the country. Some Americans and other foreigners were deported,

slowly the barbs ceased, the cacophony of distrust quieted. Life

returned. (GT 81).

Although Angelou is disillusioned with the nonviolent strategies of Martin Luther King

Jr., she and her friends commemorate his 1963 march on Washington by organizing a parallel demonstration in Ghana. The demonstration becomes a tribute to African-

American W.E.B. Du Bois, who has died the previous evening. A few pages later, she allies herself with Malcolm X, who visits Ghana in 1964 to elicit the support of Black world leaders. He encourages Angelou to return to America to help him coordinate his efforts, as she had done for King in The Heart of a Woman. While driving Malcolm X to the airport, he chastises her for her bitterness about Du Bois' wife Shirley Graham’s lack of support for the civil rights movement.

Angelou and her roommates reluctantly hire a village boy named Kojo to do housework for them. He reminds her of her brother Bailey, and he serves as a substitute for her son Guy. She is forced to accept a maternal role with Kojo, helping him with his schoolwork and welcoming the thanks of his family, who have rejected him. Traveling

Shoes, like Angelou's previous autobiographies, is full of conflicts with Guy, especially surrounding his independence, his separation from his mother, and his choices. When she learns that he is dating a woman older than her, she reacts with anger and threatens to strike him, but he patronizes her, calls her his "little mother", and insists upon his autonomy from her.

The African narrative in Traveling Shoes is interrupted by "a journey within a journey" when she decides to join a theatrical company in a revival of The Blacks, a play by French writer Jean Genet. As she had done in New York and described in her previous autobiography The Heart of a Woman, she plays the White Queen and tours 163

Berlin and Venice with the company, which include Cicely Tyson, James Earl Jones,

Lou Gossett, Jr., and Roscoe Lee Brown.

While in Berlin, she accepts a breakfast invitation with a racist, wealthy

German family. She says “for the first time in our lives, or the lives of our remembered families, we were welcomed by a president. We lived under laws constructed by

Blacks, and if we violated those laws we were held responsible by Blacks. For the first time, we could not lay any social unhappiness or personal failure at the door of colour prejudice” (GT 78).The book ends with Angelou's decision to return to America. At the airport, a group of her friends and associates, including Guy, are present to wish her farewell as she leaves Africa. She metaphorically connects her departure from Africa with the forced slavery of her ancestors and her departure from Guy.

Angelou pathetically states:

I allowed the shapes to come to my imagination: children passed tied

together by ropes and chains, tears abashed, stumbling in dull

exhaustion, then women, hair uncombed, bodies gritted with sand, and

sagging in defeat. Men, muscles without memory, minds dimmed,

plodding, leaving bloodied footprints in the dirt. The quiet was awful.

None of them cried, or yelled, or bellowed. No moans came from them.

They lived in a mute territory, dead to feeling and protest. These were

the legions, sold by sisters, stolen by brothers, bought by strangers,

enslaved by the greedy and betrayed by history. (GT 98)

All seven of Angelou's instalments of her life story continue the long tradition of

African-American autobiography. Starting with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,

Angelou made a deliberate attempt while writing her books to challenge the usual structure of the autobiography by critiquing, changing, and expanding the genre. Her 164 use of fiction-writing techniques such as dialogue, characterization, and thematic development has often led reviewers to categorize her books as autobiographical fiction. Angelou expressed in a 1989 interview her opinion that she was the only

"serious" writer to choose the genre to express herself. Angelou reports not one person's story, but the collective's. She represents the convention in African-American autobiography, which serves as a public gesture that speaks for an entire group of people. As Angelou had done in her previous autobiographies, she uses elements of the

African-American slave narrative.

All of Angelou's autobiographies conform to the genre's standard structure: they are written by a single author, they are chronological, and they contain elements of character, technique, and theme. Although Angelou referred to her books as autobiographies in 1983 interview with African-American literature critic Claudia Tate, she acknowledged that there are fictional aspects to all her books, with the tendency to

"diverge from the conventional notion of autobiography as truth".

When speaking of her unique use of the genre, Angelou acknowledges that she follows the slave narrative tradition of "speaking in the first-person singular talking about the first-person plural, always saying I meaning 'we'". McPherson states that

Angelou is a master of this autobiographical form, especially the "confrontation of the

Black self within a society that threatens to destroy it", but departs from it in Traveling

Shoes by taking the action to Africa. According to Angelou, “To many Africans only

Whites could be strangers. All Africans belonged somewhere, to some clan. All Akan- speaking people belong to one of eight blood lines (Abosua) and one of eight spirit lines (Ntoro)” (GT 99).

Angelou recognizes that there are fictional aspects to all her books, although there is less fictionalization in Traveling Shoes than in her previous autobiographies. 165

Her approach parallels the conventions of many African-American autobiographies written during the abolitionist period in the US, when truth was often censored for purposes of self-protection. Hagen places Angelou in the long tradition of African-

American autobiography, but insists that Angelou has created a unique interpretation of the autobiographical form. Journalist George Plimpton asked her in a 1998 interview if she changed the truth to improve her story; she stated, "Sometimes I make a diameter from a composite of three or four people, because the essence in only one person is not sufficiently strong to be written about".

Although Angelou has never admitted to changing the facts in her stories, she fictionalizes them to make an impact and to enhance her readers' interest. Angelou's long-time editor, Robert Loomis stated that she could have rewritten any of her books by changing the order of her facts to make a different impact on the reader. Black

American insouciance was the one missing element in West Africa. Courtesy and form, traditional dignity, respectful dismissal and history were the apparent ropes holding their society close and nearly impenetrable. But people had been unable to guard against intrusion of any sort, so we had developed audacious defences which lay just under their skin.

For the first and only time in Angelou's series, she repeats the same episode in detail—her son's automobile accident—at the end of her fourth autobiography The

Heart of a Woman and the beginning of this one, a technique that both centralizes each instalment and connects each book in the series with each other. Additionally, each volume ends with abrupt suspense. It also creates a strong and emotional link between the two autobiographies. Angelou has said that she used this technique so that each book would stand alone and to establish the setting in Traveling Shoes, who she was and what she was doing in Africa. 166

In Traveling Shoes, Angelou has matured as a writer to the point that she can experiment with form. For the first time, instead of using traditional numbered chapters, the book consists of anecdotes separated with a few inches of white space.

These segments are called "short stories or vignettes", a technique that Angelou had used before, to portray dynamic characters like Malcolm X. Angelou's stories are told within the context of her entire life story, but each vignette can be read or analyzed individually, without harming the text's consistency. Most of Angelou's anecdotes no longer focus on the famous or her family, but on Ghanaians; for example, according her description of her houseboy Kojo is her most delightful character sketch in the book.

In Traveling Shoes, Angelou continues to demonstrate her strengths as an autobiographer, especially her ability to connect emotionally with her audience. The language she uses records moments of emotional intensity. Like in her previous books,

Angelou uses inventive metaphors and personifications of abstract objects and concepts. Even her descriptions exhibit the style, developed after years of maturity as a writer, of displaying vivid and captivating sentences and phrases.

Angelou's self-portrait of a Black woman and her ability to communicate her misfortunes destroys stereotypes and demonstrates the trials, rejections, and endurances which so many Black women share. People born into democracies and who have learned to repeat, if not to practice, the statement that all men are created equal think themselves immune to the power of monarchies. They are pridefully certain that they would never tug their forelocks nor would their knees ever bend to a lord, laird or feudal master. But most have never had those beliefs put to test. Being physically close to extreme power causes one to experience a giddiness, an intoxication.

Even though Traveling Shoes can be read on its own, Angelou connects the events in this book with her previous volumes, as she had done throughout her series. Everyday 167 experiences serve as links to Angelou's past and thus embody powerful meanings.

Events that occur in this book and Angelou's responses to them evoke earlier moments in her previous books; for example, Angelou responds to her son's accident with muteness, as she had responded to her rape in Caged Bird. As is customary in autobiography in general, she uses the literary convention of flashbacks in order to tie this book to its predecessors. She uses humour, another convention she has used before, both to criticize racism and to balance her weighty insights. She also uses quotes from literary sources, especially the Bible, which demonstrates that she has not lost contact with her family roots as she searches for a home and for her identity.

Traveling Shoes is more tightly controlled than Angelou's previous books, most likely due to the dominance of the travel motif. Setting, always an important element for Angelou, becomes even more important in this book. Unlike her previous books, most of this book's action occurs in one setting, Accra, which contributes to and is tightly connected with her personal development. Angelou's feelings towards living in

Ghana are ambivalent, which provides Traveling Shoes with richness and depth. Many feel that Angelou's inclusion of her tour with The Blacks to Berlin and Venice as a digression that detracts from the African setting. It is a contribution to her character development and provides the book with a "universal quality" as Angelou reaches beyond the confines of her personal life and encounters racism in Germany. During this trip, she comes to see her fellow African-Americans differently, as more spirited than the Africans she has met in Ghana.

A major theme in Traveling Shoes, one that many critics overlook, is Angelou's love for her son. The theme of motherhood is one of Angelou's most consistent themes throughout her series of autobiographies, although it does not overwhelm this book as it does in Gather Together in My Name and Singin’ and Swingin’ and Getting Merry 168

Like Christmas. Motherhood is present in many of the book's subthemes—her relationship with her houseboy Kojo, her delight in being called "Auntie" by many

African children, and her feelings toward "Mother Africa". Traveling Shoes begins with

Guy's accident, his long recovery, and his mother's reaction to it, thus universalizing the fear of every parent—the death of a child.

The main character is a mother of a grown son, so liberation from the daily responsibilities of motherhood is emphasized, but it is complicated by the recognition that part of motherhood is letting go, something Angelou struggles with. Confrontations between Angelou and Guy are minimal, consisting of their conflict over his choice of dating a much-older woman and of his demands for autonomy after she returns from the Genet tour. Angelou seems to vacillate between wanting to supervise him and wanting to let go throughout this book. In this way, as Lupton says, the motherhood theme, like the identity theme, is "dual in nature".

Like many of her previous books, Angelou is conflicted about her feelings towards Guy, and is skilled at expressing it in this book. One way she expresses her conflict is through her reluctant relationship with Kojo. She compares her feelings for

Kojo with the pain of childbirth, and he serves as substitute for Guy. At the end of the book Angelou leaves Guy in Africa to continue his education, suggesting, the apparent end of the mother/son plot. Angelou's exploration of her African and African-American identities is an important theme in Traveling Shoes. The alliances and relationships with those she meets in Ghana contribute to Angelou's identity and growth. Her experiences in Ghana helped her come to terms with her personal and historical past, and by the end of the book she is ready to return to America with a deeper understanding of both the African and American parts of her character. 169

Angelou is able to recognize similarities between African and African-

American culture; as the "blue songs, shouts, and gospels" she has grown up with in

America "echo the rhythms of West Africa". She recognizes the connections between

African and American Black cultures, including the children's games, the folklore, the spoken and non-verbal languages, the food, sensibilities, and behaviour.

She connects the behaviour of many African mother figures, especially their generosity, with her grandmother's behaviours. In one of the most significant sections of Traveling Shoes, Angelou recounts an encounter with a West African woman who recognizes her, on the basis of her appearance, as a member of the Bambara group of

West Africa. As these and other experiences in Ghana demonstrate her maturity, as a mother who is able to let go of her adult son, as a woman who is no longer dependent upon a man, and as an American who is able to "perceive the roots of her identity" and how they affect her personality.

Angelou comes to terms with her difficult past, both as a descendant of Africans taken forcibly to America as slaves and as an African-American who has experienced racism. As she tells interviewer Connie Martinson, she brought her son to Ghana to protect him from the negative effects of racism because she did not think he had the tools to withstand them. She remains in Accra after his accident because it was traumatic for her as well—so traumatic it reduces her to silence, similar to her muteness after she was raped as a child in Caged Bird. Her friend Julian Mayfield introduces her to Efua Sutherland, who becomes Angelou's Sister friend and allows her to cry out her pain, grief, and fear, something Angelou later admitted went against her American upbringing of emotional restraint.

Racism, an important theme in all of Angelou's autobiographies, continues to be important in this book, but she has matured in the way she deals with it in Traveling 170

Shoes. For the first time in Angelou's life, she does not feel threatened by racial hated in Ghana. She finds a strong support system there, and as she has come far from the mute, shy little girl of Stamps, Arkansas. As Angelou is not yet ready to toss off the stings of prejudice, but tolerance and even a certain understanding can be glimpsed.

This is demonstrated in Angelou's treatment of the genocide involvement of Africans in slave-trading, something that is often overlooked or misrepresented by other Black writers. Angelou is taught an important lesson about combating racism by Malcolm X, who compares it to a mountain in which everyone's efforts, even the efforts of Shirley

Graham DuBois, whom Angelou resents, is needed.

Angelou learns lessons about herself and about racism throughout Traveling

Shoes, even during her brief tour of Venice and Berlin for The Blacks revival. She revives her passion for African-American culture as she associates with other African-

Americans for the first time since moving to Ghana. She compares her experiences of

American racism with Germany's history of racial prejudice and military aggression.

The verbal violence of the folk tales shared during her luncheon with her German hosts and Israeli friend is as significant to Angelou as physical violence, to the point that she becomes ill. Angelou's first-hand experience with fascism, as well as the racist sensibilities of the German family she visits, help shape and broaden her constantly changing vision regarding racial prejudice.

The journey, or travel, is a common theme in American autobiography as a whole. It is something of a national myth to Americans as a people. This is also the case for African-American autobiography, which has its roots in the slave narrative.

Like those narratives that focus on the writers' search for freedom from bondage, modern African-American autobiographers like Angelou seek to develop "an authentic self" and the freedom to find it in their community. The journey to a distant goal, the 171 return home, and the quest which involves the voyage out, achievement, and return are typical patterns in Black autobiography.

The travel motif is seen throughout Angelou's series of autobiographies, emphasizing Angelou's continuing journey of the self. Angelou continues the travel motif in Traveling Shoes, as evidenced in the book's title, but her primary motivation in living in Africa, as she told interviewer George Plimpton, was "trying to get home".

Angelou not only relates her own journey of an African-American woman searching for a home, but the journeys of other Black expatriates at the time, compared to the descriptions of white expatriates in Europe in the 1920s by Ernest Hemingway and

Henry James.

Angelou was one of over two hundred Black American expatriates living in

Accra at the time. She was able to find a small group of expatriates, humorously dubbed "the Revolutionary Returnees", who became her main source of support as she struggled with her place in African culture—the conflicting feelings of being 'home' yet simultaneously being 'homeless,' cut off from America without tangible roots in their adopted black nation. For many Black Americans, it was the first time they were able to positively identify with Africa. Angelou describes the group of Black American expatriates as "a little group of Black folks, looking for a home". Angelou presents her readers with a wealth of information and penetrating impressions of the proud, optimistic new country of Ghana. Angelou also presents a "romanticized" view of

Africa. She "falls in love" with Ghana and wishes to settle into her new home "as a baby nuzzles in a mother's arms".

Angelou soon discovers that her fellow Black expatriates share similar delusions and that their feelings towards Ghana and its people are not reciprocated. Her alliance with the African-American community often focuses on their indignation over 172 the Ghanaians' refusal to fully welcome them. Angelou uses the parallel demonstration to King's 1963 March on Washington to demonstrate both her and her fellow expatriates' tenuous relationship with Africa and her desire for full citizenship and assimilation, an unattainable goal that falls outside of her desire for assimilation and something she can never acquire in Ghana. Not only is Angelou a Black American, whether she likes it or not, she is a Black American in exile.Houston A. Baker, in his review of Traveling Shoes, states that Angelou is unable to experience a connection with what Angelou calls the "soul" of Africa, and that Angelou speculates that only the

American Black, forcibly displaced and taken from the home of her ancestors, can truly understand "that home is the place where one is created".

Angelou's issues are resolved at the end of Traveling Shoes when she decides to leave Guy to continue his education in Accra and return to America. The final scene of the book is at the Accra Airport, with Angelou surrounded by Guy and her friends as they wish her farewell. Even though she forsakes her new embraced alliance with

Mother Africa, she claims she is "not sad" to be leaving. She calls her departure a

"second leave-taking", and compares it to the last time she left her son, with his grandmother in Singin and Swingin and Getting Merry Like Christmas when he was a child, and to the forced departure from Africa by her ancestors. 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.

All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes is the fifth instalment in a series of narrative memoirs by the poet and writer Maya Angelou. This instalment recalls several years in the mid-sixties that Ms. Angelou spent in Ghana discovering the Africa of her ancestry. This book opens the reader's eye to the turbulent time of the Civil Rights 173

Movement, introduces key figures of that time period and explores the ancestry of a people taken wrongly from their homes. Maya Angelou is a celebrated poet, writer, performer and producer. With All God's Children, Ms. Angelou opens a deeply emotional time in her life and shares it with the world.

Ms. Angelou arrived in Ghana in 1962 to settle her son, Guy, in university before moving on to a new job and a new life. However, an accident in which her son broke his neck forced Ms. Angelou to remain in Ghana. After a period of intense mourning and self-pity, Ms. Angelou found herself searching for a job and a place to live with the assistance of newly made friends. Soon, Ms. Angelou had a job at the same university she had come to enroll her son in and was living at the local YMCA.

Ms. Angelou, normally an outgoing person, quickly made friends among the other lodgers at the YMCA. Ms. Angelou and two of these friends, American

Returnees Alice and Vicki, decided to get a house together. Their living room soon became a meeting place for other American Returnees. Often there would be great political discussions that would last late into the night at their home or the home of a mutual friend, Julian Mayfield. With the quick recovery of her son, Ms. Angelou soon found comfort in her new life in Africa.

Guy attended classes at the university, while Ms. Angelou did clerical work at the university and helped a professor and friend with the production of her many plays.

Ms. Angelou even starred in one of these productions. However, Ms. Angelou realized the pay would never help her pay off her son's tuition and the car she had purchased.

Ms. Angelou went to the local paper and offered her skills as a writer. She was hired on the spot to write a piece about the racial unrest in America. However, this job too would only pay the local minimum. Ms. Angelou went to the local broadcasting office to offer her services there and was quickly dismissed by the unfriendly receptionist. 174

This episode caused Ms. Angelou to rethink her ideas of discrimination and to ponder why the Africans did not welcome the American Returnees with open arms.

While living in Ghana, Ms. Angelou and her housemates employed a houseman who helped with the cooking and cleaning. This man, Otu, had a cousin whom he persuaded Ms. Angelou to take on as her small boy, or servant. In the beginning, Ms.

Angelou was reluctant because money was tight. When she discovered the boy wanted to go to school as well, she felt she had been tricked into providing this for him.

However, Ms. Angelou later found out the boy came from a wealthy family and had been sent to her simply to learn from her the white ways, as his family described her knowledge.

Ms. Angelou attended the annual harvest ritual with a friend. Later, while at a club dancing, she met a man named Sheikhali, a cattle barren from Mali. Ms. Angelou and Sheikhali had a passionate affair that ended when Sheikhali insisted Ms. Angelou become his second wife and she refused. Ms. Angelou was a strong and independent woman, and Sheikhali wanted a woman who would be at his beck and call. Ms.

Angelou was not prepared to be that kind of woman.

In Ghana, Ms. Angelou met a tribal king, Nana Nketsia, who became one of her champions, searching for a higher paying job for her. Ms. Angelou also participated in the organizing of a march across from the American Embassy on the same day of

Martin Luther King, Jr.'s march on Washington. Ms. Angelou also met Malcolm X when he came to Ghana to gather support from various governments as he made a bid to visit the United Nations and present the plight of the black American. Ms. Angelou was chosen to drive Malcolm around to his various meetings and had many private discussions with him in regards to civil rights, as well as subjects of a more personal 175 nature. Malcolm showed Ms. Angelou pictures of his children on several occasions, expressing how much he missed them.

Shortly after Ms. Angelou had an argument with her son regarding his right to live his own life, she took a part in a play that was performed in Germany and Venice.

While in Germany, Ms. Angelou made the acquaintance of a German couple who invited her to breakfast at her home. Ms. Angelou took along a black Jewish actor she had met at the hotel bar. The breakfast proved to be tenser than Ms. Angelou had expected. With relief, Ms. Angelou returned to the hotel and the play. When the play finished its run, Ms. Angelou took a side trip to Cairo, Egypt to visit some old friends and to meet up with Julian and others during a conference there. At a party for the

Liberian president, Ms. Angelou was invited to sing, an experience that was deeply touching to her.

Toward the end of Ms. Angelou's time in Ghana, shortly before she would return to the states to head up an office of the Organization of Afro American Unity for

Malcolm X, Ms. Angelou took a trip to the western edge of Ghana to a village called

Keta. While in route to this small village, Ms. Angelou experienced a strange episode in which she was grasped with unexplainable fear when faced with crossing a bridge into the village. Later, in the marketplace, Ms. Angelou was mistaken for a relative of some of the villagers who had been taken by the slavers many, many years before. This experience finally gave Ms. Angelou the sense of coming home she had searched for since coming to Africa.

Very often the African-American mother is symbolised by the spirit of independence, a keen sense of personal rights, and a deep love for her children. The husband and wife were often separated on the auction block. Children were always left under the care of the mother. So mother is an important figure in the Negro family from 176 the days of slavery and a fatherless, mother-centered pattern of family life developed among them. The black women have started singing the songs of their experience. The autobiographical tradition evolved with a determination to tell a free story. The double onslaught of white racism and black male sexism on black woman finally shaped their personality.

Rajesh Nair critically states:

Flouting the chronological time, the mother-child configuration forms

the basic pattern against which other relationships are measured and

around which other volumes begin or end. Moreover, motherhood gives

the serial autobiography a literary unity, as Angelou shifts positions

from mother to grand-daughter to child in a never ending text, the

repetition of maternal motifs also provide an ironic comment on her own

sense of identity. Despite her preoccupation with maternal love,

Angelou is in fact trapped in the conflicts that echo her ambivalence

towards her mother, Vivian Baxter and her apparent sanctification of

grandmother Henderson. (202)

Autobiography has been a very powerful mode of expression among the

African-Americans. The important autobiographies penned down by them are Booker

T. Washington’s Up from Slavery, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, Malcolm X’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Zora Neale Hurston’s

Dust Tracks on a Road, Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi and indeed the various volumes of Maya Angelou.

Among the African-American women writers, Maya Angelou is indeed a major figure and her autobiographical series prove this fact beyond doubt. Notable critics like

George Kent and Elizabeth Schultz have rightly pointed out the unifying element of the 177 theme of motherhood throughout the serial autobiography of Maya Angelou. Angelou’s deployment of black motherhood as a series of constantly renegotiated relationship that

African-American women experience with one another, with black children, with the community and self, remains the sustaining motif in her autobiographies.

Invariably, all the five volumes of autobiography explore, both literally and metaphorically, the significance of motherhood. However, the theme shall be approached from two perspective. Angelou’s relationship to her mother and to mother substitutes especially to Momma Henderson and Maya’s relationship to her own role as mother/ artist. Throughout the series the autobiographer moves backwards and forwards, from connection to conflict. The dialectic of black mother-daughterhood introduced in the childhood narrative, enlarges and contracts during the series, finding its fullest expression.

To conclude, the autobiographies of Maya Angelou shows us that African-

American women today are no longer the midnight caged birds, but phoenixes singing joyfully the song of their true self. In fact, they have transcended the geometric oppression of gender, class and race displaying the radiant black female self in an unprecedented manner. Angelou breaks ground for new representations of the African-

American female self’ illustrating wonderfully the contours of its evolutionary movement. Conclusion

Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women. Superadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own. (Harriets Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl)

Autobiographies claim our attention for a host of reasons. At the least, they satisfy a legitimate curiosity about the ways of men. It is fascination to enter into the private life of some-one else, so different from us even if he is a neighbour, to hear of the small circumstances of private and social life, of emotional involvements, prejudices and passions, beliefs and convictions, that are normally each man’s secret; in the case of men of notable achievement, to learn the personal story of well-known events, of motives and intentions that are hidden behind them.

Beyond the interest of such particulars, autobiographies offer an unparalleled insight into the mode of consciousness of other men. Even if what they tell us is not factually true, or only partly true, it always is true evidence of their personality.

Knowledge of this type, direct historical and psychological knowledge, is not simply interesting and instructive; it is necessary to people if they are to get on term with themselves. And in autobiographies this knowledge is given in a particularly attractive way, as a story in which, as in a novel, it is won over to the hero. Not that the author must try to win readers by proving that he, the hero, is worthy, morally or by his achievements, of the readers admiration; if he does so, we tend to feel alienated.

Like other literary forms, autobiography has its history. It is a creation of

European civilisation, and really begins with Augustine. There are numerous autobiographical statements in classical Greek and Roman literature, accounts of things done or works written, communings with the self. But never is the unique, personal 179 story, in its private as well as public aspect, considered worthy of the single-minded devotion of the author. In Oriental and Byzantine literature, as in ancient and modern

Europe, there are extended accounts written by men to justify themselves against charges or lament their misfortunes, to plead for clemency or charity. These interesting personal documents confine themselves to the relevant issues and are autobiographical merely by force of circumstance.

African-American Literature is the body of literature produced in the United

States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of the late 18th-century writers. Before the high point of slave narratives, African-American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. African-American literature reached early high points with slave narratives of the nineteenth century.

The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was a time of flowering of literature and the arts. Writers of African-American literature have been recognized by the highest awards, including the Nobel Prize. Among the themes and issues explored in this literature are the role of African Americans within the larger American society,

African-American culture, racism, slavery and social equality. African-American writing has tended to incorporate oral forms, such as spirituals, sermons, gospel, music, blues or rap.

As African Americans' place in American society has changed over the centuries, so, has the focus of African-American literature. Before the American Civil

War, the literature primarily consisted of memoirs by people who had escaped from slavery; the genre of slave narratives included accounts of life under slavery and the path of justice and redemption to freedom. There was an early distinction between the literature of freed slaves and the literature of free blacks who had been born in the

North. Free blacks had to express their oppression in a different narrative form. Free 180 blacks in the North often spoke out against slavery and racial injustices using the spiritual narrative. The spiritual addressed many of the same themes of slave narratives, but has been largely ignored in current scholarly conversation.

In broad terms, African-American literature can be defined as writings by people of African descent living in the United States. It is highly varied. African-

American literature has generally focused on the role of African Americans within the larger American society and what it means to be an American. African-American literature explores the issues of freedom and equality long denied to Blacks in the

United States, along with further themes such as African-American culture, racism, religion, slavery, a sense of home, segregation, migration, feminism, and more.

African-American literature presents the African-American experience from an

African-American point of view. In the early Republic, African-American literature represented a way for free blacks to negotiate their new identity in an individualized republic. They often tried to exercise their political and social autonomy in the face of resistance from the white public. Thus, an early theme of African-American literature was, like other American writings, what it meant to be a citizen in post-Revolutionary

America. African-American literature has both been influenced by the great African diasporic heritage and shaped it in many countries. It has been created within the larger realm of postcolonial literature

A genre of African-American literature that developed in the middle of the 19th century is the slave narrative, accounts written by fugitive slaves about their lives in the

South and, often, after escaping to freedom. They wanted to describe the cruelties of life under slavery, as well as the persistent humanity of the slaves as persons. At the time, the controversy over slavery led to impassioned literature on both sides of the issue, with novels such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe's 181 representing the abolitionist view of the evils of slavery. Southern white writers produced the "Anti-Tom" novels in response, purporting to truly describe life under slavery, as well as the more severe cruelties suffered by free labor in the North.

Examples include Aunt Phillis’s Cabin (1852) by Mary Henderson Eastmen and The

Sword and the Distaff (1853) by William Gilmore Simms.

The slave narratives were integral to African-American literature. Some 6,000 former slaves from North America and the Carribbean wrote accounts of their lives, with about 150 of these published as separate books or pamphlets. Slave narratives can be broadly categorized into three distinct forms: tales of religious redemption, tales to inspire the abolitionist struggle, and tales of progress. The tales written to inspire the abolitionist struggle are the most famous because they tend to have a strong autobiographical motif. Many of them are now recognized as the most literary of all

19th-century writings by African Americans, with two of the best-known being

Fredrick Douglass’s autobiography and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet

Jacobs by (1861).

Early African-American spiritual autobiographies were published in the late

18th and early 19th centuries. These spiritual narratives were important predecessors of the slave narratives which proliferated the literary scene of the 19th century. These spiritual narratives have often been left out of the study of African-American literature because some scholars have deemed them historical or sociological documents, despite their importance to understanding African-American literature as a whole.

African-American women who wrote spiritual narratives had to negotiate the precarious positions of being black and women in early America. Women claimed their authority to preach and write spiritual narratives by citing the Epistle of James, often calling themselves "doers of the word". The study of these women and their spiritual 182 narratives are significant to the understanding of African-American life in the

Antebellum North because they offer both historical context and literary tropes.

Women who wrote these narratives had a clear knowledge of literary genres and biblical narratives.

This contributed to advancing their message about African-American women’s agency and countered the dominant racist and sexist discourse of early American society. After the end of slavery and the American Civil War, a number of African-

American authors wrote nonfiction works about the condition of African Americans in the United States. Many African-American women wrote about the principles of behaviour of life during the period.

The Harlem Renaissance from 1920 to 1940 was a flowering of African-

American literature and art. Based in the African-American community of Harlem in

New York City, it was part of a larger flowering of social thought and culture.

Numerous Black artists, musicians and others produced classic works in fields from jazz to theatre; the renaissance is perhaps best known for the literature that came out of it. The Harlem Renaissance marked a turning point for African-American literature.

Prior to this time, books by African Americans were primarily read by other Black people. With the renaissance, though, African-American literature—as well as black fine art and performance art—began to be absorbed into mainstream American culture.

A large migration of African Americans began during World War I, hitting its high point during World War II. During this Great Migragion, Black people left the racism and lack of opportunities in the American South and settled in northern cities like

Chicago, where they found work in factories and other sectors of the economy. This migration produced a new sense of independence in the Black community and contributed to the vibrant Black urban culture seen during the Harlem Renaissance. The 183 migration also empowered the growing American Civil Rights Movement, which made a powerful impression on Black writers during the 1940s, '50s and '60s. Just as Black activists were pushing to end segregation and racism and create a new sense of Black

Nationalism, so too were Black authors attempting to address these issues with their writings.

Beginning in the 1970s, African-American literature reached the mainstream as books by Black writers continually achieved best-selling and award-winning status.

This was also the time when the work of African-American writers began to be accepted by academia as a legitimate genre of American literature. As part of the larger

Black Arts Movement, which was inspired by the Civil Rights and Black Power

Movements, African American literature began to be defined and analyzed. A number of scholars and writers are generally credited with helping to promote and define

African-American literature as a genre during this time period, including fiction writers

Toni Morrison and Alice Walker and poet James Emanuel.

While African American literature is well accepted in the United States, there are numerous views on its significance, traditions, and theories. To the genre's supporters, African American literature arose out of the experience of Blacks in the

United States, especially with regards to historic racism and discrimination, and is an attempt to refute the dominant culture's literature and power. In addition, supporters see the literature existing both within and outside American Literature and as helping to revitalize the country's writing. To critics], African-American literature is part of a

Balkanization of American literature. In addition, there are some within the African

American community who do not like how their own literature sometimes showcases

Black people. 184

Throughout American history, African Americans have been discriminated against and subject to racist attitudes. This experience inspired some Black writers, at least during the early years of African-American literature, to prove they were the equals of European-American authors. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr, has said, "it is fair to describe the subtext of the history of black letters as this urge to refute the claim that because blacks had no written traditions they were bearers of an inferior culture"(46).

By refuting the claims of the dominant culture, African-American writers were also attempting to subvert the literary and power traditions of the United States. Some scholars assert that writing has traditionally been seen as something defined by the dominant culture as a white male activity. This means that, in American society, literary acceptance has traditionally been intimately tied in with the very power dynamics which perpetrated such evils as racial discrimination.

By borrowing from and incorporating the non-written oral traditions and folk life of the African diaspora, African-American literature broke the mystique of connection between literary authority and patriarchal power. In producing their own literature, African Americans were able to establish their own literary traditions devoid of the white intellectual filter. This view of African-American literature as a tool in the struggle for Black political and cultural liberation has been stated for decades.

According to Joanne Gabbin, a professor states African-American literature exists both inside and outside American literature. Somehow African American literature has been relegated to a different level, outside American literature, yet it is an integral part. She bases her theory in the experience of Black people in the United

States. Even though African Americans have long claimed an American identity, during most of United States history they were not accepted as full citizens and were 185 actively discriminated against. As a result, they were part of America while also outside it.

Similarly, African-American literature is within the framework of a larger

American literature, but it also is independent. As a result, new styles of storytelling and unique voices have been created in relative isolation. The benefit of this is that these new styles and voices can leave their isolation and help revitalize the larger literary world (McKay, 2004). This artistic pattern has held true with many aspects of

African American culture over the last century, with jazz and hip hop being just two artistic examples that developed in isolation within the Black community before reaching a larger audience and eventually revitalizing American culture. Since African-

American literature is already popular with mainstream audiences, its ability to develop new styles and voices—or to remain "authentic," in the words of some critics—may be a thing of the past.

Some conservative academics and intellectuals argue that African-American literature exists as a separate topic only because of the balkanization of literature over the last few decades, or as an extension of the culture wars into the field of literature.

According to these critics, literature is splitting into distinct and separate groupings because of the rise of identity politics in the United States and other parts of the world.

These critics reject bringing identity politics into literature because this would mean that only women could write about women for women, and only Blacks about Blacks for Blacks. People opposed to this group-based approach to writing say that it limits the ability of literature to explore the overall human condition.

Critics also disagree with classifying writers on the basis of their race, as they believe this is limiting and artists can tackle any subject. Proponents counter that the exploration of group and ethnic dynamics through writing deepens human 186 understanding and previously, entire groups of people were ignored or neglected by

American literature. The general consensus view appears to be that American literature is not breaking apart because of new genres like African-American literature. Instead,

American literature is simply reflecting the increasing diversity of the United States and showing more signs of diversity than before in its history.

Maya Angelou is one of the many twentieth-century African American women whose works are written in the form of autobiography. Angelou has much in common with Zora Neale Hurston, whose autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), tells how she rose above her origins in Eatonvile, an all-black town in Florida, to become a famous folklorist and novelist. Like Hurston in Florida, Angelou in Arkansas flavours her autobiography with the language of black folk culture. Angelou also writes autobiographical texts that include the Bambara people of Africa. A second woman autobiographer whom Angelou resembles is the poet Gwendolyn Brooks, in that both

Brooks and Angelou locate their autobiographical experience in Africa.

Among all the women writers, Maya Angelou was the voice of three generations. Her works spanned our journey, chronicled hearts and documented the struggles as the slave people moved from the orations of Martin Luther King to the presidency of Barack Obama. Dr. Maya Angelou was a phenomenal woman. She is known for her rousing spirit and a joyful soul. She is remarkable and gifted writer, a trailblazer, an activist and a loving mother. Maya was not stuck on colour or gender or religion or sexual orientation. She was fixated on humanity and helping to bring love and kindness into this world.

Like every great artist, she emerged from deep and sorrowful struggle to reveal a beautiful, confident, calm and wise soul. She used that struggle to transform herself and made one believe that everyone, too, could transform themselves as well.Like the 187 incredible tall oak trees of her beloved Arkansas, she was rooted in culture, grounded in the goodness of this earth and her amazing gift of poetry. She had a talent for weaving words into songs and songs into melodies. And she inspired us to do the same.

Maya Angelou also had a playful side. Like any good friend, she enjoyed the company of people. Maya had everyone laughing. She was a gifted storyteller and her warmth filled up many empty hearts. She made a place for so many folks in her life, in her kitchen or on her stage. Maya was born wise and when she talked, one could hear the ancient wisdom of her ancestors. She carried that warrior spirit from Africa. But that, of course, is what a great poet does. She speaks for herself, but she speaks for all the people who suffer under racism. And the amazing thing about Maya Angelou was that, although she was a black woman, her poems touched the souls of all Americans.

Maya Angelou was an accomplished dancer, singer, writer of prose and poetry, and the recipient of many honours. She has even been referred to as a "National Institution"

(Bloom, 2002).In the exploration of the life and works of Angelou, many will have the opportunity to investigate many of the events and attitudes she has experienced during her lifetime. Her writing, through the eyes and experiences of a black woman, lend a structure to the study of racial relations and culture in 20th century in America. African

American autobiography is a distinct genre of literature. Angelou's series of autobiographical works is distinctly seen from the female African American experience. She "...writes for the Black voice and any ear which can hear it" (Angelou in Evans, p.3).

Cudjoe offers a helpful outline of the importance of African American autobiographical works:

The practice of the autobiographical statement, up until the

contemporary era, remains the quintessential literary genre for capturing 188

the cadences of Afro-American being, revealing its deepest aspirations

and tracing the evolution of the Afro-American psyche under the impact

of slavery and modern U.S. imperialism. (6)

However, despite the long history of autobiography written in the African American voice, the voice was almost exclusively a male voice until the second half of the last century. Cudjoe notes that "...the Afro-American woman remained in all-pervading absence until she was rescued by the literary activity of her Blacksisters..." (7).

African American autobiography is a personal presentation of experience. While autobiography can sometimes be a bit blurred, it is portrayed from the memory of the writer and generally represents authentic experiences of that person in a society.

Angelou's work is then, a presentation of the life of a black woman who has lived in the south and in the urban north, who has lived in Africa, and has traveled Europe. She has experienced poverty and despair and she has been granted high honours. Her work is the expression of those experiences and sensations through the eyes of a black woman.

As a young adult, Angelou worked as a dancer, singer and actress, and she began to write songs and poetry. She travelled a European tour with the opera Porgy and Bess.

Angelou learned new languages as she traveled and she became fluent in English,

Italian, Spanish, French, Arabic, and West African Fanti. In the 1950's Angelou joined the Harlem Writer's Guild and began to work on her writing with earnest. She wrote prose, poetry, screenplays, songs, short stories and more. She also became involved in the civil rights movement during that time and wrote and produced a show to benefit the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She later became the Northern

Coordinator of that organization for several years.

Angelou and her son spent a number of years living in Cairo, Egypt and Ghana.

During that time she worked as a newspaper editor and teacher of dance and drama. 189

During her time overseas Angelou became familiar with the home and culture of her

African heritage. She met Malcolm X and became even more closely aligned to the civil rights activities. She returned to the United States and had hoped to work closely with Malcolm X but he was assassinated as she was to begin her work with him. She was also involved with the work of Martin Luther King, Jr. It was not until after his death, and at the urging of friends, that she wrote her first autobiography at the age of

42.

Angelou has written six autobiographical volumes. They have alternated with books of poetry and essays. She has also written several children's books. All of the autobiographical works have been produced as adult looking through the eyes of the child and young woman who was evolving. The work is a glimpse into the experiences of a black, female individual who has had to find an identity through the experiences lived. Maya Angelou has been married several times but none of the relationships survived. As she grew older she continued to write autobiographical material, poems, songs, screen plays, television series, and directed a motion picture. In 1981 Angelou was offered a lifetime chair as the Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake

Forest University in North Carolina. She has had an active lecture schedule as well.

Maya Angelou was asked by then President-elect Bill Clinton to write a poem for his inauguration. She read a poem she wrote for the occasion, "On the Pulse of Morning", at the 1993 inauguration ceremony. She was the first African American and first woman to be given such an honour. Ms. Angelou has received many other academic and national honours. She was granted her first honorary doctorate degree in 1975. She was granted the Presidential Medal of the Arts in 2000. The received the Lincoln Medal from the Ford's Theatre in 2008. In February, 2011she was awarded the Presidential

Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honour, by President Barak Obama. 190

Maya Angelou provides a narrative of her life from early childhood until the age of 16 in her first autobiographical publication, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The first volume ends with the birth of her out-of-wedlock son. It begins with the humiliations of childhood and ends with the birth of a child. With the birth of her child, Maya is herself born into a mature engagement with the forces of life. Thus this autobiography begins with the separation of mother and daughter, ends in their bonding. The mother, daughter and infant triangle of the final scene marks the completion of Maya’s journey to womanhood. Although she is still fearful and dependent, she shows signs of being able to control her life as a black woman.

Her second work, Gather Together in My Name, describes the troubled years between the ages of 17 and 19 when she was struggling as a single mother living in poverty and surrounded by illicit activities. The Maya of Caged Bird is easily recognizable as a child growing up in rural America whose experiences of abandonment and rape make her as memorable, in her way as Mark Twain’s adventuresome Huckleberry Finn is memorable in his way. The Maya of Gather

Together is a different kind of woman, a Maya who has come of age, a survivor who endurance is representative of a new class of black women.

In this autobiography, Angelou continues but alters the point of view of her first autobiography. It gives an account of a mother and her struggle to survive as a black woman in White America. As a womanist, Maya shows strong evidence of being stubborn. From her initial decision to leave her mother to her final decision to return,

Maya acts in a self-determined way. At times, she fantasizes about being married and protected, but rejects these dreams as unrealistic. For the most part, she directs her own course of events. 191

Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmasis the third autobiographical volume. It portrays the adventures of her young adult life in San

Francisco through her European tour with the Broadway musical Porgy and Bess. This autobiography marks an historical moment in the history of African American autobiography. At this time, no other well-known black female autobiographer had taken her story into a third volume. Maya’s decision to keep going affects point of view by telling her life story in three distinct but connected segments, each linked to the other by changing central character and by the first-person point of view.

In extending her story into a third frame, Angelou deviates from the more contained autobiographical pattern, which tends to begin in a moment of revelation and to end at some decisive moment in the autobiographer’s life. Angelou extends her true voice through this autobiographical narrative form. Her singing and swinging performances at the Purple Onion and her outstanding dancing in Porgy and Bess bring her a good measure of the public recognition that will be her due from now on, as indicated by her concert performances with the singers Ashford and Simpsons in the late 1990’s. Her primary cultural role in this autobiography is a stage performer, not as a writer. As a person who dramatizes the songs and dances of the African, Caribbean and African American oral tradition, she gives a dramatic expression to other people’s words and music.

The fourth volume, The Heart of a Woman, outlines her personal and artistic growth along with her perceptions of racial relations during the 1950's and 1960's. In this autobiography, Angelou presents herself as a matured individual. She is no longer a threatened Southern child, no longer a deluded prostitute or a fledgling dancer, is now in the position to offer direction to black women and men younger than herself, to be a model like many autobiographers before her. She differs from most male narrators, 192 though; she is a woman with a woman’s heart. As such, Angelou is able to offer a woman’s perspective as she reveals her concerns about her self-image and her conflicting feelings about her lovers and her son.

All God's Children Need Travelin' Shoes, the fifth autobiographical work, describes her years of living in Ghana and her reconnection with her African roots. This volume also portrays some of her interactions with Malcolm X.Angelou reiterates certain familiar patterns of the African American slave narrative – the journey; the quest for freedom; empathy for the horrors suffered by slaves. Her courage 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.

In this autobiography, she describes the kinds of punishment to which slaves were submitted. The slave mother’s misery throughout the 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 the last pages of Traveling Shoes, Angelou signifies the slave within herself as she narrates her effect on certain Africans, descended from a plundered people, who, having heard her voice, 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.

The final autobiographical work is A Song Flung Up to Heaven. In this last work she shares her experiences in the four years between her return from West Africa and the time she began work on I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Each of the five volumes explores, both literally and metaphorically, the significance of motherhood. It examines 193 the theme from two specific perspectives: first, Angelou’s relationship to her mother and to mother substitutes, especially to Momma Henderson; second, Angelou’s relationship to her son as she struggles to define her own role as mother/artist.

Throughout the volumes, Angelou moves backwards and forwards, from connection to conflict. This dialectic of Black mother-daughterhood, introduced in the childhood narrative, enlarges and contracts during the series, finding its fullest expression in all her autobiographies.

In flux, in defiance of chronological time, the mother-child configuration forms, the basic pattern against which other relationships are measured and around which episodes and volumes begin or end. Motherhood also provides the series with a literary unity, as Angelou shifts positions- from mother to granddaughter to child- in a non- ending text that, through its repetitions of maternal motifs, provides an ironic comment on her own sense of identity. For Angelou, despite her insistence on mother love, is trapped in the conflicts between working and mothering, independence and nurturing – conflicts that echo her ambivalence towards her mother, Vivian Baxter, and her apparent sanctification of Grandmother Henderson.

Angelou’s style owes as much to eighteenth and nineteenth century English narratives – those of Swift, Defoe and Dickens in particular – as it does to the black vernacular. It is truly a crossroads of influences and, at its best, weaves all these strands into a pattern in which, though they have become indistinguishable from one another, they give depth and detail to the narrative. According to George E. Kent, two areas of

Black life subtend the development of Angelou’s narrative, the religious and the blues traditions.

Her grandmother represents the religious influence: black fundamentalism, the

Christian Methodist Episcopal church. Her mother on the other hand, stands for the 194 blues-street tradition, the fast life. The ambivalence that occupies the centre of all feminist problematics about writing: to produce the book, the woman must follow rhythms of creativity which may be in conflict with the mothering/nurturing role. The mother’s energy flows unchecked and unselfconsciously. She has raw power, and her style is improvised like the ebb and flow of Jazz.

If this flow of creative rhythms is in counterpoint to actual mothering of a real child, it is interesting to note again that Angelou the author dedicates her first volume to her son. To the extent that Angelou feels strongly that a mother can never be fully independent-psychologically detached, that is – she constantly wrestles with this conflict. Her text embodies these tensions in its structure. Indeed Maya’s struggle is of a different nature from that of the males: more personal and less public or social. There are no direct or violent confrontations with intense racial overtones. Her sense of humour is in sharp contrast to the seriousness of a Richard Wright.

The title of her volumes implies that her subject is much more than the exploration or representation of this circumscribed domain. It is rather, the investigation of the process through which the bird learns how to sing and the reasons why she does so in the face of adversity. The titles in all her autobiographies introduce the major metaphors that will run through all her life. They tend to portray their lives of struggle against the white oppressor and their efforts to destroy the cage of racism and slavery. It is not really the struggle of the bird; it is the exploration of the cage, the gradual discovery of its boundaries, the loosening of certain bars that she can slip through when the keepers’ back are turned.

Angelou does not elaborate on how she distinguishes literary autobiography form any other kind of autobiography, and of course, for a poststructuralist, the challenge to write literary rather than “ordinary” autobiography is meaningless because 195 there is no difference between the two. For a formalist aesthetic, however, the distinctive qualities and characteristics of literary or poetic language as opposed to ordinary language are central operative concerns.

The final volume of relays the pain experienced by the African American community as it watched the assassinations of Malcolm Xand Martin Luther King, Jr. and lived within the racial tensions in the United States during the closing years of the decade of the 1960's.Maya Angelou has been a prolific writer of and multiple volumes of her work have been published. Many of her works speak to the experience of the

African American community, most especially the African American woman. Common themes poetry include topics such as love, the beauty of the black woman, the strength of woman, political statements, social justice, and the resilience of the human spirit.

To conclude, 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 advised, Angelou is able to bring to her country a first-hand account of a continent that most African Americans have deeply felt but rarely visited. Her memorable search for roots reverberates now, as it did then, through her countless interviews on television, in periodicals and in the popular press.

As one of the best known of all contemporary autobiographers, Maya Angelou extends a tradition initiated by slaves and continually reimaged by popular writers of African 196 descent. Hence her autobiographies portray the suffering and survival of her life and the suffering and survival of the whole African Americans. The scope for future research in Maya Angelou’s autobiographies can be analysed through the theories of feminism, new historicism, post colonialism and postmodernism.

197

Works Cited

Angelou, Maya, Gather Together in My Name, Random House (New York, NY), 1974.

Angelou, Maya, Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry like Christmas, Random House

(New York, NY), 1976.

Angelou, Maya, The Heart of a Woman, Random House (New York, NY), 1981.

Angelou, Maya, All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes, Random House (New York,

NY), 1986.

Angelou, Maya, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Bantam (New York, NY), 1993.

Bloom, Harold, editor, Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Chelsea

House Publishers (New York, NY), 1995.

Braxton, Joanne M., editor, Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: A

Casebook, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1999.

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1900-1998, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1998.

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Dramatists and Prose Writers, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1985.

Encyclopedia of World Biography, second edition, seventeen volumes, Gale (Detroit,

MI), 1998. 198

Evans, Mari, editor, Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation, Anchor

Press-Doubleday (New York, NY), 1984.

Inge, Tonette Bond, editor, Southern Women Writers: The New Generation, University

of Alabama Press (Tuscaloosa, AL), 1990.

King, Sarah E., Maya Angelou: Greeting the Morning, Millbrook Press (Brookfield,

CT), 1994.

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2003.

Lisandrelli, Elaine Slivinski, Maya Angelou: More than a Poet, Enslow Publishers

(Berkeley Heights, NJ), 1996.

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Events That Influenced Them, Volume 4: World War II to the Affluent Fifties

(1940s-1950s), Gale (Detroit, MI), 1997.

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MI), 2000.

Spain, Valerie, Meet Maya Angelou, Random House (New York, NY), 1994.

Black American Literature Forum, summer, 1990, Mary Jane Lupton, "Singing the

Black Mother: Maya Angelou and Autobiographical Continuity," pp. 257-276.

Black Issues Book Review, March, 2001, Maitefa Angaza, "Maya: A Precious Prism,"

p. 30; March-April, 2002, Elsie B. Washington, review of A Song Flung up to

Heaven, pp. 56-57. 199

Essence, December, 1992, Marcia Ann Gillespie, interview with Angelou, pp. 48-52;

August, 1998, Lisa Funderberg, interview with Angelou and Congresswoman

Eleanor Holmes Norton, pp. 70-76.

Mother Jones, May-June, 1995, Ken Kelley, interview with Angelou, pp. 22-25.

National Post, July 20, 2002, Marcie Good, "Inspiration for Hire: Hallmark Has Hired

Poet Maya Angelou," p. SP1.

New York Times Book Review, June 16, 1974, Annie Gottlieb, review of Gather

Together in My Name; December 19, 1993, Anne Whitehouse, review of

Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now, p. 18; June 5, 1994, p. 48.

Paris Review, fall, 1990, Maya Angelou, and George Plimpton, "The Art of Fiction

CXIX: Maya Angelou," pp. 145-167.