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MAYA ANGELOU: SELF NARRATION AND THE CREATIVE IMPULSE

This chapter explores three selected novels of Maya Angelou - I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Gather Together In My Name, and The Heart of a Woman tracing the trend of her creative impulse in self narration. The activities of the Civil Rights Movements and the Black Arts Movements were pivotal in the socio-political milieu of the generation and events surrounding political activism features in the novels.

REMEMBRANCE AND HEALING IN MAYA ANGELOU’S I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

Jeffrey M Elliot in his Conversations with Maya Angelou (1989) provides details of Angelou‘s personal life. Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Annie Johnson on 4 April 1928 in St. Louis to Vivian Baxter and Bailey Johnson, a civilian dietician for the U.S. Navy. At age three, she was sent to Stamps to be cared for by their paternal grandmother, Mrs. Annie Henderson. While growing up she and her brother Bailey were trained at the daily meetings of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, or at her grandmother's general merchandise store. She graduated from the Lafayette County Training School in 1940 and returned to her mother in San Francisco. 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 1950s.

In 1959, Angelou and her son moved to New York and joined the Harlem Writers Guild with the help of John Killens. 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 gained the position of the Northern coordinator for the SCLC at the request of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Her

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work in theatre opened up opportunities in role like the White Queen in Genet's The Blacks, directed by Gene Frankel at St. Mark's Playhouse. Elizabeth Bealieu (2006) records that for the production of The Blacks, she joined a cast of stars like Roscoe 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 Angeles. Original screenplays to her credit include the film version of Georgia and the television productions of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and The Sisters. She also authored and produced a television series on African traditions inherent in American culture and played the role of Kunta Kinte's grandmother in Roots. For PBS programming, she served as a guest interviewer on Assignment America and appeared in a special series on creativity hosted by Bill Moyers, which featured a return visit to Stamps. Her other achievements include appointment to the Commission of International Women's Year by former President Carter; nomination of Woman of the Year in communications by Ladies‘ Home Journal and nomination as a trustee of the American Film Institute and member of the Directors Guild. She has received 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 field 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 Tosh Angelos, a sailor of Greek-American ancestry, but their marriage 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 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. Her literary reputation is based on the publication of five volumes of autobiography – I Know why the Caged Bird Sings (1970) Gather Together in My Name, (1974) Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry

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Like Christmas, The Heart of a Woman (1981) – and five volumes of poetry – Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘fore 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.

The novel I Know why the Caged Bird Sings derived its title from poet Paul Laurence Dunbar‘s ―Sympathy‖ (1899), the poem combines the themes of imperative self-knowledge with the artist‘s desire for voice amid the pervasive silencing of a hostile and corrupt society. Maya Angelou‘s first novel begins with the two Johnson children, Maya (a shortened form of Marguerite) and her brother Bailey, riding on a train to Stamps, Arkansas, from California. Moving from the West Coast to the South, through to the Midwest briefly, and ultimately back to the West again, the textual and geographic itinerary of the novel forms a symbolic circle, tacitly enunciating a yearning for wholeness. For these children passed around, the home provided by the strong female presence of their paternal grandmother, Mrs. Annie Henderson, offers a catalyst for their educational and emotional development. While rural Stamps provides the earliest scenes of instruction both in and outside of the home, San Francisco emerges as the site where the older Maya explores a more diverse spectrum of opportunities from which to forge a life path.

Maya Angelou calls attention to displacement as the most important loss in her childhood as she is separated from her parents at age three and never fully regains a sense of security and belonging. Carol E. Neubauer (1990:116) asserts that her displacement from her family is not only an emotional handicap but is compounded by an equally unsettling sense of racial and geographic displacement. In the novel, Angelou describes her coming of age as an insecure black girl in the American South during the 1930s and subsequently in California during the 1940s. 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. As young children, Maya and Bailey struggle with the pain of having been rejected and abandoned by their parents. Angelou is shuttled around to seven different homes between the ages of three and sixteen: from California to Stamps to St. Louis to Stamps to Los Angeles to Oakland to San Francisco to Los Angeles to San Francisco.

These movements validate Neubauer view of the unsettling effect of geographic displacement.

Angelou first confidently reaches back in memory to re-enact the painful times:

when she and her brother Bailey fail to understand the adult code and, therefore, break laws they know nothing of; when they swing easily from hysterical laughter to desperate

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loneliness, from a hunger for heroes to the voluntary pleasure-pain game of wondering who their real parents are and how long it will be before they come to take them to their real home. Dolly A. McPherson (1999:22) states that growing up in Stamps, Arkansas is:

a continual struggle against surrender to the very large adults, who, being black, practiced and taught special traditions whose roots were buried in Africa or had been created during centuries of slavery. According to these traditions, a good child dropped her eyes when speaking to an adult; a good child spoke softly; a good child never

resisted the idea that whites were better, cleaner, or more intelligent than blacks. Growing up and surviving as a

young girl in the South of the 1930s and early 1940s is a painful experience for a young girl whose world is colored by disillusion and despair, aloneness, self-doubt, and a diminished sense of self.

Indeed, Angelou underscores her diminished sense of self and rootlessness of her early childhood years in the Easter Sunday recital when she is unable to finish reciting a poem in church, and self-consciously feeling ridiculed and a failure, she races from the church crying, laughing, wetting herself, yet she expresses her predicament in the few lines of the poem she tries to recite:

―What you looking at me for? I didn't come to stay. . .‖ I hadn‘t so much forgot as I couldn‘t bring myself to remember. Other things were more important. ―What you looking at me for? I didn't come to stay. . .‖ Whether I could remember the rest of the poem or not was immaterial. The truth of the statement was like a wadded-up handkerchief, sopping wet in my fists, and the sooner they accepted it the quicker I could let my hands open and air would cool my palms. ―What you looking at me for...?‖

(1)

The words are painfully appropriate and the statement above becomes her shield against the cold reality of her rootlessness. However, James Saunders (2009:3) cites displacement and physical movements as valid sites for young Maya‘s social conditioning:

a physical movement between geographical regions has been part of that literary tradition, a given in slave narratives where virtually all of the authors first had to escape southern slavery and then make their way north before being in a position to record the events of their lives.

Such geographical movement has been particularly important in the life and autobiographies of the artist Maya Angelou, described by Butterfield as one who ―does not

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submit tamely to the cage. She is repeatedly thrust into situations where she must act on her own initiative to save herself and thereby learns the strength of self-confidence‖.

Besieged by the tripartite crossfire of racism, sexism, and power, young Angelou is belittled and degraded at every turn, making her unable to put down her shield and feel comfortable staying in one place. When she is thirteen and moves to San Francisco with her mother and Bailey, she feels that she belongs somewhere for the first time. Young Maya identifies with the city as a town full of displaced people. Maya's personal displacement echoes the larger societal forces that displaced blacks all across the country. She realizes that thousands of other terrified black children made the same journey as she and Bailey, travelling on their own to newly affluent parents in northern cities, or back to southern towns when the North failed to supply the economic prosperity it had promised. As young children in Stamps in the 1930s, racial prejudice severely limits their lives. Within the first pages, she sums up this demoralizing period:

I stumbled and started to say something, or maybe to scream, but a green persimmon, or it could have been a lemon, caught me between the legs and squeezed. I tasted the sour on my tongue and felt it in the back of my mouth.

Then before I reached the door, the sting was burning down my legs and into my Sunday socks. I tried to hold, to squeeze it back, to keep it from speeding, but when I reached the church porch I knew I‘d have to let it go, or it would probably run right back up to my head and my poor head would burst like a dropped watermelon, and all the brains and spit and tongue and eyes would roll all over the place. So I ran down into the yard and let it go. I ran, peeing and crying, not toward the toilet out back but to our house. I‘d get a whipping for it, to be sure, and the nasty children would have something new to tease me about. I laughed anyway, partially for the sweet release; still, the greater joy came not only from being liberated from the silly church but from the knowledge that I wouldn‘t die from a busted head. 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. (3).

The pain of her continual degradation and 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.

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In the opening pages of the book, Maya suffers from a strong sense of racial self-hatred. She internalizes the idea that blond hair is beautiful and that she is a fat black girl trapped in a nightmare, thus her fantasies are ephemeral:

Wouldn‘t they be surprised when one day I woke out of my black ugly dream, and my real hair, which was long and blond, would take the place of the kinky mass that Momma wouldn‘t let me straighten? My light-blue eyes were going to hypnotize them, after all the things they said about ―my daddy must of been a Chinaman‖ (I thought they meant made out of china, like a cup) because my eyes were so small and squinty. Then they would understand why I had never picked up a Southern accent, or spoke the common slang, and why I had to be forced to eat pigs‘ tails and snouts. Because I was really white and because a cruel fairy stepmother, who was understandably jealous of my beauty, had turned me into a too-big Negro girl, with nappy black hair, broad feet and a space between her teeth that would hold a number-two pencil. (2).

At this point, she entirely separates her sense of self from her sense of race, creating room for identity crisis compounded by received ideas of white feminine beauty. For Maya, real life in Stamps means there is no magical metamorphosis, no respite from her

―black dream‖.

Young Maya confronts the insidious effects of racism and segregation in America at a very young age. White dominance intrudes on several occasions that also teach Maya vital lessons in courage and survival and open her eyes to the fact that she belongs

to an oppressed class. In Uncle Willie, for example, she sees the dual peril of being black and crippled when he is forced to hide in the potato bin when the ex-sheriff casually warns Grandmother Henderson that local white lynchers will be on a rampage in the black community. Through this terrifying experience, Maya learns that lameness offers no protection from the wrath of bigots. The scene with the ex-sheriff only leaves Maya humiliated and angry:

The used-to-be sheriff sat rakishly astraddle his horse. His nonchalance was meant to convey his authority and power over even dumb animals. How much more capable he would be with Negroes. It went without saying. His twang jogged in the brittle air. From the side of the Store, Bailey and I heard him say to Momma, ―Annie, tell Willie he better lay low tonight. A crazy nigger messed with a white lady today.

Some of the boys‘ll be coming over here later.‖ Even after the slow drag of years, I remember the sense of fear which filled my mouth with hot, dry air, and made my body light.

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The ―boys‖? Those cement faces and eyes of hate that burned the clothes off you if they happened to see you lounging on the main street downtown on Saturday. Boys?

It seemed that youth had never happened to them. Boys? No, rather men who were covered with graves‘ dust and age without beauty or learning. The ugliness and rottenness of old abominations. If on Judgment Day I were summoned by St. Peter to give testimony to the used-to-be sheriff‘s act of kindness, I would be unable to say anything in his behalf. His confidence that my uncle and every other Black man who heard of the Klan‘s coming ride would scurry under their houses to hide in chicken droppings was too humiliating to hear. (14)

As the ex-sheriff leaves without waiting for Momma‘s thanks, Maya muses in indignation the vicissitudes of growing up black in an atmosphere of pervasive uncertainty, racist and sexist devaluation.

This first autobiography provides detailed testimony to the daily insults visited upon members of Angelou‘s extended family as well as neighbouring blacks who work hard picking cotton, never to get ahead or even see beyond their debilitating financial situations. Infact, Elizabeth Ann Beaulieu (2006:446) affirms that:

In Stamps, the narrator expresses her frustration with the treatment of the blacks in the rural community: the drudgery and alienation resulting from toil in the cotton fields, the victimization by local racists, and the small but searing indignities faced by her loved ones, a daily reminder of color prejudice.

While her grandmother is indeed the proud owner of a local general store, even that matriarch suffers insults delivered by young, poor white girls who insist on addressing her by her first name, Annie. One memorable episode bears witness to the indignities endured by Maya‘s grandmother at the hands of some neighbourhood poor whites:

Before the girls got to the porch I heard their laughter crackling and popping like pine logs in a cooking stove. I suppose my lifelong paranoia was born in those cold, molasses-slow minutes. They came finally to stand on the ground in front of Momma. At first they pretended seriousness. Then one of them wrapped her right arm in the crook of her left, pushed out her mouth and started to hum. I realized that she was aping my grandmother. Another said, ―Naw, Helen, you ain‘t standing like her. This here‘s it.‖ Then she lifted her chest, folded her arms and mocked that strange carriage that was Annie Henderson. Another laughed, ―Naw, you can‘t do it. Your mouth ain‘t pooched out enough. It‘s like this.‖ I thought about the rifle behind the door, but I knew I‘d never be able to hold it straight,

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and the .410, our sawed-off shotgun, which stayed loaded and was fired every New Year‘s night, was locked in the trunk and Uncle Willie had the key on his chain. Through the fly-specked screen-door, I could see that the arms of Momma‘s apron jiggled from the vibrations of her humming. But her knees seemed to have locked as if they would never bend again. She sang on. No louder than before, but no softer either. No slower or faster. The dirt of the girls‘ cotton dresses continued on their legs, feet, arms and faces to make them all of a piece. Their greasy uncoloured hair hung down, uncombed, with a grim finality. I knelt to see them better, to remember them for all time. The tears that had slipped down my dress left unsurprising dark spots, and made the front yard blurry and even more unreal. The world had taken a deep breath and was having doubts about continuing to revolve. (24-25).

Her grandmother is further outraged when a dentist, to whom she had lent money when he was in danger of losing his practice, now refuses to examine her granddaughter and adamantly proclaims: ―I‘d rather stick my hand in a dog‘s mouth than in a nigger‘s.‖

These unjust social realities confine and demean Maya and her relatives. She comes to learn how the pressures of living in a thoroughly racist society have profoundly shaped the character of her family members, and she strives to surmount them.

It is believed that many growing young girls, denied the emotional satisfaction of loving, concerned parents, look for emotional support at school or at play and if they are lucky, they find something that moderates their emotional discontent. For young Maya, however, there is little compensation of this sort or references to rewarding peer association. She is not only dislocated by her environment but also is alienated from any supporting peer relationships. 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. The second time Mr. Freeman embraces the eight-year-old girl, he rapes her. The rape, an excruciatingly painful act that involves Maya in ambiguous complicity, produces confusion, shame, and guilt. The courtroom where Mr. Freeman's trial for rape is held would be imposing to a mature, self-confident adult, but it is shattering to the child, whose confusion, shame, and guilt are further compounded by the voyeuristic aspects of the open courtroom testimony. When Maya is unable to remember what Mr. Freeman was wearing when he raped her, the lawyer suggests that she, not the defendant, is to blame for her victimization. Bewildered and frightened, Maya denies that Mr. Freeman ever touched her before the rape—partly because, in her confusion, she is