Maya Angelou
By Susan Margrave
She was dressed in a red velvet-sheened gown and pearls. She smiled. She sang. She laughed a heart-felt guffaw. She joked. She confessed to her foibles. She quoted poetry that many had never heard before.
And she and the audience fell in love with each other.
Maya Angelou appeared on the stage of the Arkansas Hall auditorium on March 3 to exhort the capacity crowd of 1,000 to embrace literature "to find the rainbows in the sky," as her grandmother and uncle in Stamps had taught her and her older brother, Bailey, to do in the 1920s. Her appearance was one of the C. Vann Woodward Lectures in Southern History and Literature sponsored by Henderson State University.
The connection was immediate. Angelou walked onto the stage and started singing. The audience was hers from that point on. She confessed that her celebrity had made her wary of air travel - too many persons, too many requests for attention. She now travels on a private bus from her home in Winston-Salem, N. C., to shield herself from the attention her appearance in public places seems to excite. The poet turns 77 next month. "People were shoving their babies onto me!" she told the audience. "I borrowed a page from the rock stars. I got a bus!"
The message, however, to students and adults was that they needed to embrace literature and poetry. To blacks, especially, she said, literature and poetry offers an uplifting message. "I'm especially glad to be in Arkansas and at Henderson tonight," she said. "Henderson is and has been a rainbow. Its incandescence was a light to those who never dreamed of finishing high school."
Angelou said she had never agreed with Thomas Wolfe's assertion of You Can't Go Home Again, the title of the sequel to Look Homeward, Angel . "You carry your home with you," she said, "though I found my great rainbows in the clouds in Arkansas."
She was three and Bailey was five when their parents separated. The youngsters were sent by train - unaccompanied - to her paternal grandmother in Stamps, and she said the fact that they arrived where they were supposed to was thanks to "Pullman porters and dining staff across the United States." They were delivered to Annie "Momma" Henderson and Uncle Willie Johnson and lived there for four years.
Uncle Willie was paralyzed on his right side, Angelou said, the result of a birth defect, but she and her brother just knew him as "a cripple." Momma taught her to read, and Uncle Willie taught her math. He had her recite multiplication tables as he held her near a wood-burning stove, causing the youngster to believe that if she made a mistake in her recitations, he "would surely put (her) into that stove!"
She never realized the scope of her uncle's influence until after his death, Angelou said. She had returned to Arkansas to settle his estate and was met at the Little Rock airport by Daisy Gatson Bates. She told Angelou there was someone she needed to meet. That person was Charles Bussey, the first black mayor of Little Rock. Bussey told her that Uncle Willie had taught him math, too. She asked how Willie had done that, and Bussey replied by holding him close to the wood-burning stove, Angelou said, eliciting laughter from the audience.
Later, a white store owner in Stamps told her he, too, had learned math from Uncle Willie - with the aid of the wood-burning stove.
"I had no idea of the range of Willie's influence," Angelou said before breaking into a song about her uncle that Angelou wrote for singer Roberta Flack.
When she was seven and Bailey was nine, they moved to St. Louis to live with their mother, Vivian Baxter Johnson, Angelou laughed, probably more to cramp the divorcee's style than to nurture the two children. It was there that the eight-year-old girl was raped by her mother's boyfriend. Her mother's family likely was responsible for the man's murder, so Angelou quit speaking, fearing the power that her words had wrought. It wasn't long before she and Bailey returned to Stamps and the stability of Momma and Uncle Willie.
Throughout her lecture, Angelou called on poetry - her own and that of her favorites, such as James Weldon Johnson and Paul Laurence Dunbar, from whose poem "Sympathy" she took the title of her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - to emphasize her points.
"All literature is meant to increase the species," she said, "to let the species know that someone was here before you who was abused, who suffered … and yet miraculously survived and thrived … ."
She noted that African-American literature is too little taught and rarely cherished and challenged to the audience to visit the "ill-treated" libraries and ask for works by African-Americans or any of the great Southern authors and poets.
Literature, she said, "is capable of making a dark day brighter, is capable of making a heavy day lighter.
"I encourage you to go to the literature," she said. "There are various Southern writers, black and white. There is somebody who looks like you, somebody who sounds like you."