{"id":30120,"date":"2014-05-28T22:06:30","date_gmt":"2014-05-29T02:06:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=30120"},"modified":"2014-05-28T22:10:43","modified_gmt":"2014-05-29T02:10:43","slug":"lyrical-witness-to-jim-crow-and-the-caged-bird","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=30120","title":{"rendered":"Maya Angelou: Lyrical Witness to Jim Crow, and the Caged Bird"},"content":{"rendered":"

By MARGALIT FOX<\/strong><\/p>\n

Maya Angelou, whose landmark book of 1969, \u201cI Know Why the Caged Bird Sings\u201d \u2014 a lyrical, unsparing account of her childhood in the Jim Crow South \u2014 was among the first autobiographies by a 20th-century black woman to reach a wide general readership, died on Wednesday at her home in Winston-Salem, N.C. She was 86.<\/p>\n

<\/embed><\/p>\n

In a recording, Angelou reads her poem “Still I Rise.”-via NPR.org<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Maya<\/a>

Maya Angelou (Apr 4, 1928-May 28, 2014)| In her writing, Ms. Angelou explored identity and resilience through the multifaceted lens of race, sex, family, community and the collective past.<\/p><\/div>\n

Her death was confirmed by her literary agent, Helen Brann. The cause was not immediately known, but Ms. Brann said Ms. Angelou had been frail for some time and had heart problems.
\n
\nIn a statement, President Obama said, \u201cToday, Michelle and I join millions around the world in remembering one of the brightest lights of our time \u2014 a brilliant writer, a fierce friend and a truly phenomenal woman,\u201d adding, \u201cShe inspired my own mother to name my sister Maya.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though her memoirs, which eventually filled six volumes, garnered more critical praise than her poetry did, Ms. Angelou (pronounced AHN-zhe-low) very likely received her widest exposure on a chilly January day in 1993, when she delivered her inaugural poem, \u201cOn the Pulse of Morning,\u201d at the swearing-in of Bill Clinton, the nation\u2019s 42nd president. He, like Ms. Angelou, had grown up in Arkansas.<\/p>\n

It began:<\/p>\n

A Rock, A River, A Tree
\nHosts to species long since departed,
\nMarked the mastodon,
\nThe dinosaur, who left dried tokens
\nOf their sojourn here
\nOn our planet floor,
\nAny broad alarm of their hastening doom
\nIs lost in the gloom of dust and ages.<\/p>\n

But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,
\nCome, you may stand upon my
\nBack and face your distant destiny,
\nBut seek no haven in my shadow,
\nI will give you no hiding place down here.<\/p>\n

Long before that day, as she recounted in \u201cCaged Bird\u201d and its sequels, she had already been a dancer, calypso singer, streetcar conductor, single mother, magazine editor in Cairo, administrative assistant in Ghana, official of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and friend or associate of some of the most eminent black Americans of the mid-20th century, including James Baldwin, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.<\/p>\n

Afterward (her six-volume memoir takes her only to age 40), Ms. Angelou was a Tony-nominated stage actress; college professor (she was for many years the Reynolds professor of American studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem); ubiquitous presence on the lecture circuit; frequent guest on television shows from \u201cOprah\u201d to \u201cSesame Street\u201d; and subject of a string of scholarly studies.<\/p>\n

In February 2011, Mr. Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country\u2019s highest civilian honor.<\/p>\n

Throughout her writing, Ms. Angelou explored the concepts of personal identity and resilience through the multifaceted lens of race, sex, family, community and the collective past. As a whole, her work offered a cleareyed examination of the ways in which the socially marginalizing forces of racism and sexism played out at the level of the individual.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat,\u201d Ms. Angelou wrote in \u201cI Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hallmarks of Ms. Angelou\u2019s prose style included a directness of voice that recalls African-American oral tradition and gives her work the quality of testimony. She was also intimately concerned with sensation, describing the world around her \u2014 be it Arkansas, San Francisco or the foreign cities in which she lived \u2014 with palpable feeling for its sights, sounds and smells.<\/p>\n

\u201cI Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,\u201d published when Ms. Angelou was in her early 40s, spans only her first 17 years. But what powerfully formative years they were.<\/p>\n

Marguerite Johnson was born in St. Louis on April 4, 1928. (For years after Dr. King\u2019s assassination, on April 4, 1968, Ms. Angelou did not celebrate her birthday.) Her dashing, defeated father, Bailey Johnson Sr., a Navy dietitian, \u201cwas a lonely person, searching relentlessly in bottles, under women\u2019s skirts, in church work and lofty job titles for his \u2018personal niche,\u2019 lost before birth and unrecovered since,\u201d Ms. Angelou wrote. \u201cHow maddening it was to have been born in a cotton field with aspirations of grandeur.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her beautiful, volatile mother, Vivian Baxter, was variously a nurse, hotel owner and card dealer. (Ms. Angelou\u2019s 2013 account of life with her mother, \u201cMom & Me & Mom,\u201d became a best seller.) As a girl, Ms. Angelou was known as Rita, Ritie or Maya, her older brother\u2019s childhood nickname for her.<\/p>\n

After her parents\u2019 marriage ended, 3-year-old Maya was sent with her 4-year-old brother, Bailey, to live with their father\u2019s mother in the tiny town of Stamps, Ark., which, she later wrote, \u201cwith its dust and hate and narrowness was as South as it was possible to get.\u201d<\/p>\n

Their grandmother, Annie Henderson, owned a general store \u201cin the heart of the Negro area,\u201d Ms. Angelou wrote. An upright woman known as Momma, \u201cwith her solid air packed around her like cotton,\u201d she is a warm, stabilizing presence throughout \u201cI Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.\u201d<\/p>\n

The children returned periodically to St. Louis to live with their mother. On one such occasion, when Maya was 7 or 8 (her age varies slightly across her memoirs, which employ techniques of fiction to recount actual events), she was raped by her mother\u2019s boyfriend. She told her brother, who alerted the family, and the man was tried and convicted. Before he could begin serving his sentence, he was murdered \u2014 probably, Ms. Angelou wrote, by her uncles.<\/p>\n

Believing that her words had brought about the death, Maya did not speak for the next five years. Her love of literature, as she later wrote, helped restore language to her.<\/p>\n

As a teenager, living with her mother in San Francisco, she studied dance and drama at the California Labor School and became the first black woman to work as a streetcar conductor there. At 16, after a casual liaison with a neighborhood youth, she became pregnant and gave birth to a son. There the first book ends.<\/p>\n

Reviewing \u201cI Know Why the Caged Bird Sings\u201d in The New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt called it \u201ca carefully wrought, simultaneously touching and comic memoir.\u201d<\/p>\n

The book \u2014 its title is a line from \u201cSympathy,\u201d by the African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar \u2014 became a best seller, confounding the stereotype, pervasive in the publishing world, that black women\u2019s lives were rarely worthy of autobiography.<\/p>\n

The five volumes of Ms. Angelou\u2019s memoir that follow \u201cCaged Bird\u201d \u2014 all, like the first, originally published by Random House \u2014 were \u201cGather Together in My Name\u201d (1974), \u201cSingin\u2019 and Swingin\u2019 and Gettin\u2019 Merry Like Christmas\u201d (1976), \u201cThe Heart of a Woman\u201d (1981), \u201cAll God\u2019s Children Need Traveling Shoes\u201d (1986) and \u201cA Song Flung Up to Heaven\u201d (2002).<\/p>\n

They describe her struggles to support her son, Guy Johnson, through odd jobs. \u201cDetermined to raise him, I had worked as a shake dancer in nightclubs, fry cook in hamburger joints, dinner cook in a Creole restaurant and once had a job in a mechanic\u2019s shop, taking paint off cars with my hands,\u201d she wrote in \u201cSingin\u2019 and Swingin\u2019.\u201d Elsewhere, she described her short-lived stints as a prostitute and a madam.<\/p>\n

Ms. Angelou goes on to recount her marriage to a Greek sailor, Tosh Angelos. (Throughout her life, she was cagey about the number of times she married \u2014 it appears to have been at least three \u2014 for fear, she said, of appearing frivolous.)<\/p>\n

After the marriage dissolved, she embarked on a career as a calypso dancer and singer under the name Maya Angelou, a variant of her married name. A striking stage presence \u2014 she was six feet tall \u2014 she occasionally partnered in San Francisco with Alvin Ailey in a nightclub act known as Al and Rita.<\/p>\n

She was cast in the Truman Capote-Harold Arlen musical \u201cHouse of Flowers,\u201d which opened on Broadway in 1954. But she chose instead to tour the world as a featured dancer in a production of \u201cPorgy and Bess\u201d by the Everyman Opera Company, a black ensemble.<\/p>\n

Ms. Angelou later settled in New York, where she became active in the Harlem Writers Guild (she hoped to be a poet and playwright), sang at the Apollo and eventually succeeded Bayard Rustin as the coordinator of the New York office of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization that he, Dr. King and others had founded.<\/p>\n

In the early 1960s, Ms. Angelou became romantically involved with Vusumzi L. Make, a South African civil rights activist. She moved with him to Cairo, where she became the associate editor of a magazine, The Arab Observer. After leaving Mr. Make \u2014 she found him paternalistic and controlling, she later wrote \u2014 she moved to Accra, Ghana, where she was an administrative assistant at the University of Ghana.<\/p>\n

On returning to New York, Ms. Angelou helped Malcolm X set up the Organization of Afro-American Unity, established in 1964. The group dissolved after his assassination the next year.<\/p>\n

In 1973, Ms. Angelou appeared on Broadway in \u201cLook Away,\u201d a two-character play about Mary Todd Lincoln (played by Geraldine Page) and her seamstress. Though the play closed after one performance, Ms. Angelou was nominated for a Tony Award. On the screen, she portrayed Kunta Kinte\u2019s grandmother in the 1977 television mini-series \u201cRoots,\u201d and appeared in several feature films, including \u201cHow to Make an American Quilt\u201d (1995).<\/p>\n

Ms. Angelou\u2019s marriage in the 1970s to Paul du Feu, who had previously been wed to the feminist writer Germaine Greer, ended in divorce. Survivors include her son, three grandchildren and a great-grandchild.<\/p>\n

Some reviewers expressed reservations about Ms. Angelou\u2019s memoiristic style, calling it facile and solipsistic. Others criticized her poetry as being little more than prose with line breaks. But her importance as a literary, cultural and historical figure was amply borne out by the many laurels she received, including a spate of honorary doctorates.<\/p>\n

Her other books include the volumes of poetry, \u201cJust Give Me a Cool Drink of Water \u2018fore I Diiie\u201d (1971), \u201cOh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well\u201d (1975), \u201cAnd Still I Rise\u201d (1978) and \u201cShaker, Why Don\u2019t You Sing?\u201d (1983).<\/p>\n

She released an album of songs, \u201cMiss Calypso,\u201d in 1957.<\/p>\n

But she remained best known for her memoirs, a striking fact because she had never set out to be a memoirist. Near the end of \u201cA Song Flung Up to Heaven,\u201d Ms. Angelou recalls her response when Robert Loomis, who would become her longtime editor at Random House, first asked her to write an autobiography.<\/p>\n

Still planning to be a playwright and poet, she demurred. Cannily, Mr. Loomis called her again.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou may be right not to attempt autobiography, because it is nearly impossible to write autobiography as literature,\u201d he said. \u201cAlmost impossible.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ms. Angelou replied, \u201cI\u2019ll start tomorrow.\u201d <\/p>\n

Courtesy: The New York Times<\/em><\/p>\n

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By MARGALIT FOX Maya Angelou, whose landmark book of 1969, \u201cI Know Why the Caged Bird Sings\u201d \u2014 a lyrical, unsparing account of her childhood in the Jim Crow South \u2014 was among the first autobiographies by a 20th-century black woman to reach a wide general readership, died on Wednesday at her home in Winston-Salem, …<\/p>\n

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