Maya Angelou (10 page)

What frequently goes unsaid when discussing the so-called truth in the history of African American autobiography is that in many instances the truth has been censored or hidden, out of the need for self-protection. Black
autobiographers writing during the abolitionist movement (the antislavery movement that flourished during the several decades before the Civil War) had to restrain or disguise their opinions, even toward their compassionate editors. Slave narratives withheld certain ideas that might have put the slave-teller in danger, no matter how well intentioned the transcriber might be—secret hopes for rebellion; a buried contempt for white men as rapists; and other hostile opinions toward white benefactors. Jennifer Fleischner, author of
Mastering Slavery
(1996), insists there is much to learn from the gaps or omissions that appear in the slave narratives, since these gaps can reveal disguised attitudes toward self, race, and resistance.

The nineteenth-century slave narrator, a recognized victim of the system, was supposed to give an honest account of life on the plantation, with its beatings from white overseers and sexual abuses from white owners. Not only what the slave wrote had to be “true,” but its truth had to be upheld or verified, in the preface or appendix, by conscientious white editors, publishers, and friends. Thus, the
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
was verified in the preface by abolitionist leaders William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips. Solomon Northrup's
12 Years a Slave
(1853) was verified through its dedication to the abolitionist writer Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of
Uncle Tom's Cabin
(1852).

Although Maya Angelou explored the effects of slavery and verified its power in her life and works, her concept of truth and black womanhood was transformed by its contemporary content. In
Caged Bird
, for example, she records a life story begun in fear of crosses burning in the night, a life that is directly affected by the brutal remnants of slavery. Her story ends, like the typical slave narrative, in celebration of her personal freedom and with the decision to tell her story. Angelou's autobiographies, documented with historical personages and events, thus verify the changing attitudes toward race and gender from 1931 to 1969.

As David Levering Lewis observes, her stories contain such “inner truthfulness that each of her books is a continuing autobiography of much of Afro-America” (1997, 133). Sondra O'Neale alters the truth factor, locating it in a feminist vision. She claims that the specific truth Angelou tells is the truth about the lives of black women. From this perspective Angelou is able to correct historical errors and offer a role model not often seen in American culture (1984, 35).

As a woman, Angelou tells truths about all women's lives. For black women the neglect of their histories and their literary works has been devastating, despite the change which occurred in the 1970s and 1980s, when Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, Maya Angelou, and
other black women exploded into bookstores and lecture halls, telling their stories. Angelou addresses her own issues—about rape, marriage, talent, community, responsibility to her son—from the perspective of an African American woman. In so doing she introduces material not very often developed by autobiographers, black or white. As Joanne Braxton notes, Angelou's autobiographical sources derive from “her celebration of the black women who nurtured her” (1989, 197).

Readers of
Maya Angelou: The Iconic Self
will discover, from biographical sources, interviews, and Internet sources, an assortment of “truths” about Angelou, her son Guy, her brother Bailey, her first husband, Tosh, and her unidentified African lover. There is much critical material on which to draw. But for the purist, the truth and the integrity of an autobiography or of an autobiographical series must be contained within the text itself—with the way character and theme and setting are interwoven into one singular vision.

Maya Angelou is one of the many contemporary African American women whose works are written in the form of autobiography. Angelou has much in common with Zora Neale Hurston (1901–1960), whose autobiography,
Dust Tracks on a Road
(1942), tells how she rose above her origins in Eatonville, an all-black town in Florida, to become a famous folklorist and novelist. Like Hurston in Florida, Angelou in Arkansas flavors her autobiography with the language of black folk culture. As Angelou writes autobiographical texts that include the Bambara people of Africa, Hurston had written books such as
Tell My Horse
(1938), which describe her experiences with voodoo ritual in Haiti.

A second woman autobiographer whom Angelou resembles is the poet Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000), in that both Brooks and Angelou locate their autobiographical experiences in Africa. In her autobiography
Report from Part One
(1972), Brooks describes her journey to East Africa in 1971. Her arrival is mixed with joy in being in the land of her ancestors but sadness in seeing her own language diminish in importance. Like Angelou, Brooks is unable to resolve the contradictions between being an African American while identifying with Africans, for whom she remains a stranger.

A third autobiography that demands attention in this survey is Anne Moody's
Coming of Age in Mississippi
(1968). A student at Tougaloo, a historically black college in Mississippi, Moody took part in a sit-in at a
Woolworth's lunch counter, in what was to become one of the early, memorable actions of the civil rights movement. Like Angelou, Moody knew and worked with Martin Luther King Jr. An activist, Moody played an integral part in the grassroots movement of the 1960s, whereas Angelou, who was in Africa from 1962 to 1965, saw her commitment to the American protest movement curtailed upon her return by the deaths of Malcom X and Martin Luther King Jr.

Further books for exploration in the area of the black women's autobiographical tradition are Nikki Giovanni's partial autobiography,
Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-Five Years of Being a Black Poet
(1971), which begins well but loses its autobiographical structure, becoming part book review and part essay; and bell hooks's
Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood
(1996), a free-flowing autobiography that attempts to offer black women a model for writing about their lives.

In addition to gender distinctions (and these categories frequently overlap), one needs to place Angelou's work within the historical development of African American autobiography. Two of the major black autobiographical structures, the slave narrative and the travel autobiography, are discussed more fully later in this chapter. Other significant forms are the prison autobiography, the success narrative, and the autobiography of the artist.

The prison autobiography is the genre most directly related to the earliest black narrative form, the slave narrative; they share many themes, among them captivity, self-education, mistreatment, and the desire to escape. The prison autobiography achieved prominence in the period surrounding the civil rights movement of the 1960s, through the writings of Eldridge Cleaver, George Jackson, Angela Davis, Malcolm X, and other articulate defenders of the black liberation movement.

Cleaver's
Soul on Ice
(1968) was written from Folsom prison by the man who rose to become a leader of the Black Panther Party. Cleaver describes how his prison experience made it possible to free his mind from being oppressed by the white woman, whom he has come to see as an ogre, her claws sunk into his chest. Cleaver's attack on white women had a significant effect in discouraging the interracial sexuality common in the early 1960s. Cleaver used his prison years as a way to deal with his troubled sexuality and to construct an ideology supported by the writings of Karl Marx, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and other theorists.

Reading, learning, and being able to recognize historical distortions are part of the mental discipline described in prison literature, for it was only
within the walls of the jail that many African American leaders were able to set their minds free. In his autobiography, Malcolm X is frequently thankful for the prison experience, because in jail he taught himself to read: “I don't think anybody ever got more out of going to prison than I did…. Where else but in a prison could I have attacked my ignorance by being able to study intensely sometimes as much as fifteen hours a day” (1965, 41).

For Angela Davis, who was arrested by the FBI on conspiracy charges in 1970, her prison autobiography
Angela Davis
(1974) is extremely impersonal, as if she were deliberately avoiding the kinds of sentiment that would identify her as a female. In a philosophical application of the knowledge that she already had when she went to prison, she denounces its disorganized structure and inadequate facilities. Davis notes that the library holds little other than “bad literature whose sole function was to create emotional paths of escape” (51), although she does locate the autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois. When Davis learns that she is permitted to order books from publishers, she orders ten copies of George Jackson's radical autobiography
Soledad Brother
(1970), which the guards prevent her from distributing. Despite the strict regulations, Davis is able to learn through her prison experience, especially through the relationships she forms with women prisoners. She also relished visits from friends and lawyers affiliated with the Communist Party.

Angelou's autobiographies share elements of the prison narrative, but on a symbolic rather than an actual level. The central image of the caged bird, presented throughout the six volumes, represents her imprisonment within the racist structure of Stamps, Arkansas. After she is released from Stamps, the racial discrimination continues, but with less intensity. She soon becomes aware of other forms of imprisonment—through drugs, marriage, and the economic system.

A number of black professionals have written different kinds of autobiographies that may be called first-person success narratives. This genre, meant to offer helpful models for young black men and women, is important to the black tradition because it encourages a positive response from a community where drugs and easy money are often more highly rewarded than hard work. In
Along This Way
(1933), James Weldon Johnson, one of Angelou's major influences as a child, traces his development from birth, when he was nursed by a white mammy in Jacksonville, Florida, to varied successes as lawyer, songwriter, statesman, novelist, lecturer, and occupant of the chair of Creative Literature at Fisk University, a historic black institution.

Many African American success autobiographies have been written not by creative artists but by doctors, scholars, ministers, or other professionals. Dr. Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, has influenced many people with his six books, the most famous being his autobiography
Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story
(1996), which became a television movie in 2009, starring Cuba Gooding Jr. Carson began his career as a poor and failing student in Detroit, but he eventually earned an undergraduate degree from Yale and a medical degree from the University of Michigan. In addition to his conservative writings, Carson gives inspirational talks on education, marriage, and politics. He is one of the announced Republican candidates in the 2016 presidential elections.

Also included in the success narrative category is
Colored People
, Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s 1995 autobiography. Gates, America's foremost African American theorist, describes his coming of age in Piedmont, a small black town in West Virginia. Although there are hardships, he relates closely to his own supportive community and to his family. At the end of the autobiography, Gates has come home for vacation from Yale University—Yale being a symbol of success and superior future performance. Ironically, the autobiography ends at the annual mill picnic, an honored black tradition about to end because of integration. But integration is too late. The narrator's aunt has the last word: “By the time those crackers made us join them, she added, we didn't want to go” (211).

Gates's witty and vivid descriptions of the folks in Piedmont, West Virginia, have a texture similar to Angelou's portrayal of the black community of Stamps, with their rural ways and countrified speech. What biographer Robert E. Hemenway says of Zora Neale Hurston seems sadly true of Gates, and Carson, and Angelou as well: to attain success in an autobiography, the black narrator must see himself or herself as having risen above the associations of class and culture symbolized by the very rural black people who inspired the work (1977, 281).

Angelou's last three autobiographies have strong traces of the success narrative. Her acting career, described in
The Heart of a Woman
, peaked when she portrayed the White Queen in Jean Genet's play
The Blacks
. Her fund-raising revue
Cabaret for Freedom
, which she coauthored with actor Godfrey Cambridge, won her the respect of Martin Luther King Jr. and a leadership position in his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In
All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes
, Angelou was associate editor of the
Arab Observer
and did freelance writing for the
Ghanaian Times
. She also successfully organized a solidarity demonstration
in Ghana in support of Martin Luther King's 1965 march on Washington. In
A Song Flung Up to Heaven
Angelou emerged from her grief over the deaths of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King to become an accomplished poet and party-giver. Her close friend, writer James Baldwin, urged her to begin writing an autobiography which, when completed, would be nominated for the National Book Award. These achievements alone would support the claim that the majority of Angelou's autobiographies belong to the category of the success narrative.