Cleveland - Maya Angelou danced with Langston Hughes in Harlem, drank with James Baldwin in Paris, had her picture snapped in Ghana by Malcolm X. Six feet tall and mesmerizing, she had men crossing the room to call her the most beautiful woman on the planet, but few mistook her for arm candy.

Angelou turned 80 last month, unabashedly enjoying center stage at parties in four states, from an everybody-is-invited fete in Winston-Salem to an A-list gala in Palm Beach, Fla., hosted by surrogate daughter Oprah Winfrey. The decades have burnished Angelou's unique place on the American scene, cemented partly in Bill Clinton's decision to ask her to read an original poem for his 1993 inauguration.

Scholars describe Angelou as a Mother Figure and a Living Ancestor, while everyday readers still memorize and recite her words. She is reported to earn $43,000 each time she speaks.

In poems, film, plays and, most centrally, her six autobiographical books, Angelou's voice continues to casts its spell. "Caged Bird" has sold about 4 million copies and is third on the American Library Association's list of the 100 most challenged titles.

It has been parodied on "The Simpsons" ("I Don't Wanna Know Why the Caged Bird Sings") and lionized in book clubs. It tells of the author's rape at age 7 by her mother's boyfriend, of his subsequent slaying and her decision to stop speaking for some five years.

This book about muteness -- a metaphor for the condition of African-American women -- stands upstream of countless memoirs. It helped frame and unleash the work of two generations of self-probing writers -- good, bad and indifferent -- whose work floods the contemporary marketplace.

In the crisp diction that her biographers say also marked her father's speech, Angelou reflected on responses to "Caged Bird."

"I find that people who want my book banned have never read a paragraph of my writing, but have heard that I write about a rape," she said. "They act as if their children are not faced with the same threats. And that's terrible.

"I wrote my next book, 'Gather Together in My Name,' because so many adults tell their own children, 'I've never done anything wrong. My daddy would have killed me if I did what you've done. My mama would have left town.' I wanted to tell the children something different: 'You can fall low, you can get up, and you can forgive yourself.' That is what I've done."

This theme of survival, of surmounting one's sorrow and rekindling joy, is pivotal for Angelou. It's a theme her listeners crave, and hearing her sing and tell it in person is akin to what the African-American community calls "having church."

Not everybody, however, is a member.

"How to phrase this without sounding like a university snot?" asked George Bilgere, a poet and professor of English at John Carroll University in University Heights.

"Maya Angelou is very conscious in her writing of the audience she wants to reach, and she uses the oldest and most conscious technique -- a lot a rhythm and a lot of rhyme. 'Phenomenal Woman' doesn't play to any literary fad or style, to any university or critical audience, and to look at it on the page, it doesn't look terribly sophisticated.

"But to hear her read it aloud is to see Africa as a woman who has been through everything. You have to read it aloud to hear how good she is at picking up rhyme and rhythm and metaphor."

Among critics and professors, Alice Walker's thematically similar "The Color Purple" and Toni Morrison's "Beloved" are taught and embraced. Walker won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, while Morrison is a Nobel laureate in literature. But Angelou, who never attended college, has been left outside the circle.

In an interesting way, her cultural capital accrued in spite of the literary guardians and gatekeepers, said Koritha Marshall, an English professor at Ohio State University.

"Within the academy, those of us who are in it, especially if we are black and are black women, keep her for our private joy rather than bring her into our scholarship," Marshall said.

"In truth, I was planning on reading 'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings' with my little sister, but I would not assign it in my classes."

Angelou's books emphasize the self-taught and what she calls "Mother wit," a kind of innate wisdom. The writer herself has been awarded multiple honorary degrees and has taught for years as a professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem. On her rounds, and in interviews, she insists on being called "Dr. Angelou."

Doing so is not vanity, Angelou partisans say, but a way of rebuking the history that so long stripped black people of their due.

"She's been able to create this ancestor persona," Marshall said. "And Oprah has helped her spread that idea of her being an older, wiser person who is there as a touchstone, a way to think about the values the culture has lost more generally."

Angelou is well-known for her mixture of warmth and formality. She is an early riser who won't abide cursing. She has left many a room rather than listen to homophobic or anti-white talk, decades before "politically correct" entered the argot.

"When I started writing 'Caged Bird,' I thought I was writing for young black girls, then I thought, 'Wait a minute, this is hard work. I better make it for young black boys, too,' " Angelou said in her phone interview.

"Then I started thinking about young white girls and white boys. Latinos and Asians. I began to see myself using myself as a human being. This is what we do. This is how we act. If X has happened, it is likely that we will do Y. So I have simply written, I me Maya Angelou as a human being."

She often writes "Joy" inside the covers of her books at signings.

"I started it really with Alex Haley about 30 years ago," she said. "He was writing 'Roots,' and the story was so pulling him down, the story of slavery, and we were in my house in California, and he wanted a book of mine.

"And I thought, if there was anything I could wish him, I'd wish him joy. And it occurred to me that's what I wish for everybody. Not always giddy glee, but joy."

Dressed in her favorite jewel tones, perhaps leaning on her silver cane, Angelou expects to serve some up in Cleveland Monday night.

She alone on the American stage connects it to so much history, so much gravitas, so much meaning.

Angelou speaks

Source link