This beautiful remarkable women died yesterday at the age of 86.
May she rest in peace.
A celebration of her life
By HILLEL ITALIE —
Maya Angelou's
story awed millions. A childhood victim of rape, she broke through
silence and shame to tell her tale in one of the most widely read
memoirs of the 20th century. A black woman born into poverty and
segregation, she recited the most popular presidential inaugural poem in
history.
"I'm not
modest," she told The Associated Press in 2013. "I have no modesty.
Modesty is a learned behavior. But I do pray for humility, because
humility comes from the inside out."
Angelou, a renaissance woman and cultural pioneer, died Wednesday at her home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She was 86.
"She
lived a life as a teacher, activist, artist and human being. She was a
warrior for equality, tolerance and peace," said her son, Guy B.
Johnson.
Tall and regal, with
a deep, majestic voice, she was unforgettable whether encountered in
person, through sound or the printed word. She was an actress, singer
and dancer in the 1950s and 1960s and made a brave and sensational debut
as an author in 1969 with "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," which
became standard (and occasionally censored) reading and made Angelou one
of the first black women to enjoy mainstream literary success.
"Caged
Bird" was the start of a multipart autobiography that continued through
the decades and captured a life of hopeless obscurity and triumphant,
kaleidoscopic fame.
The world was watching in
1993 when she read her cautiously hopeful "On the Pulse of Morning" at
President Bill Clinton's first inauguration. Her confident performance
openly delighted Clinton and made publishing history by making a poem a
best-seller. For President George W. Bush, she read another poem,
"Amazing Peace," at the 2005 Christmas tree lighting ceremony at the
White House. Presidents honored her in return with a National Medal of
Arts and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country's highest
civilian honor. In 2013, she received an honorary National Book Award.
She
called herself a poet, in love with the "sound of language," ''the
music in language," as she explained to the AP in 2013. But she lived so
many lives. She was a wonder to Toni Morrison, who marveled at
Angelou's freedom from inhibition, her willingness to celebrate her own
achievements. She was a mentor to Oprah Winfrey, whom she befriended
when Winfrey was still a local television reporter, and often appeared
on her friend's talk show program. She mastered several languages and
published not just poetry but advice books, cookbooks and children's
stories. She wrote music, plays and screenplays, received an Emmy
nomination for her acting in "Roots," and never lost her passion for
dance, the art she considered closest to poetry.
"The
line of the dancer: If you watch (Mikhail) Baryshnikov and you see that
line, that's what the poet tries for. The poet tries for the line, the
balance," she told The Associated Press in 2008, shortly before her 80th
birthday.
Her very name was a reinvention. Angelou was born
Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis and raised in Stamps, Arkansas, and San
Francisco, moving back and forth between her parents and her
grandmother. She was smart and fresh to the point of danger, packed off
by her family to California after sassing a white store clerk in
Arkansas. Other times, she didn't speak at all: At age 7, she was raped
by her mother's boyfriend and didn't talk for years. She learned by
reading, and listening.
"I loved the poetry that was sung in the
black church: 'Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt's land,'" she told the
AP. "It just seemed to me the most wonderful way of talking. And 'Deep
River.' Ooh! Even now it can catch me. And then I started reading,
really reading, at about 7 1/2, because a woman in my town took me to
the library, a black school library. ... And I read every book, even if I
didn't understand it."
At age 9, she was writing
poetry. By 17, she was a single mother. In her early 20s, she danced at a
strip joint, ran a brothel, got married and then divorced. But by her
mid-20s, she was performing at the Purple Onion in San Francisco, where
she shared billing with another future star, Phyllis Diller. She also
spent a few days with Billie Holiday, who was kind enough to sing a
lullaby to Angelou's son, surly enough to heckle her off the stage and
astute enough to tell her: "You're going to be famous. But it won't be
for singing."
After renaming
herself Maya Angelou for the stage ("Maya" was a childhood nickname,
"Angelou" a variation of her husband's name), she toured in "Porgy and
Bess" and Jean Genet's "The Blacks" and danced with Alvin Ailey. She
worked as a coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
and lived for years in Egypt and Ghana, where she met Nelson Mandela, a
longtime friend; and Malcolm X, to whom she remained close until his
assassination, in 1965. Three years later, she was helping King organize
the Poor People's March in Memphis, Tennessee, where the civil rights
leader was slain on Angelou's 40th birthday.
"Every
year, on that day, Coretta and I would send each other flowers,"
Angelou said of King's widow, Coretta Scott King, who died in 2006.
Angelou
was little known outside the theatrical community until "I Know Why the
Caged Bird Sings," which might not have happened if writer James
Baldwin hadn't persuaded Angelou, still grieving over King's death, to
attend a party at the home of Jules Feiffer, a cartoonist and writer.
Feiffer was so taken by Angelou that he mentioned her to Random House
editor Bob Loomis, who persuaded her to write a book by daring her into
it, saying that it was "nearly impossible to write autobiography as
literature."
"Well, maybe I will try it," Angelou responded. "I don't know how it will turn out. But I can try."
Angelou's musical style
was clear in a passage about boxing great Joe Louis' defeat in 1936
against German fighter Max Schmeling: "My
race groaned," she wrote. "It was our people falling. It was another
lynching, yet another Black man hanging on a tree. One more woman
ambushed and raped. A Black boy whipped and maimed. It was hounds on the
trail of a man running through slimy swamps. ... If Joe lost we were
back in slavery and beyond help."
Angelou's
memoir was occasionally attacked, for seemingly opposite reasons. In a
1999 essay in Harper's, author Francine Prose criticized "Caged Bird" as
"manipulative" melodrama. Meanwhile, Angelou's passages about her rape
and teen pregnancy have made the book a perennial on the American
Library Association's list of works that draw complaints from parents
and educators.
"'I thought
that it was a mild book. There's no profanity," Angelou told the AP. "It
speaks about surviving, and it really doesn't make ogres of many
people. I was shocked to find there were people who really wanted it
banned, and I still believe people who are against the book have never
read the book."
Angelou
appeared on several TV programs, notably the groundbreaking 1977
miniseries "Roots." She was nominated for a Tony Award in 1973 for her
appearance in the play "Look Away." She directed the film "Down in the
Delta," about a drug-wrecked woman who returns to the home of her
ancestors in the Mississippi Delta. She won three Grammys for her
spoken-word albums and in 2013 received an honorary National Book Award
for her contributions to the literary community.
Back in the 1960s, Malcolm
X had written to Angelou and praised her for her ability to communicate
so directly, with her "feet firmly rooted on the ground." In 2002,
Angelou communicated in an unexpected way when she launched a line of
greeting cards with industry giant Hallmark. Angelou admitted she was
cool to the idea at first. Then she went to Loomis, her editor at Random
House, who was concerned the project would "trivialize" Angelou, whom
called "the people's poet."
"And
then I thought about it. And I thought, if I'm the people's poet, then I
ought to be in the people's hands — and I hope in their hearts. So I
thought, 'Hmm, I'll do it.'"
She had been a professor of American
studies at Wake Forest University since 1982. She was also a member of
the board of trustees for Bennett College, a private school for black
women in Greensboro. Angelou hosted a weekly satellite radio show for
XM's "Oprah & Friends" channel.
She
remained so close to the Clintons that in 2008 she supported Hillary
Rodham Clinton's candidacy over the ultimately successful run of the
country's first black president, Barack Obama. But a few days before
Obama's inauguration, she was clearly overjoyed. She told the Arkansas
Democrat-Gazette she would be watching it on television "somewhere
between crying and praying and being grateful and laughing when I see
faces I know."
Active on the
lecture circuit, she gave commencement speeches and addressed academic
and corporate events across the country. Angelou received dozens of
honorary degrees, and several elementary schools were named for her.
