Maya Angelou (24 page)

In addition to the multilayered narrative, another difference in point of view is determined by the author's changed self.
The Heart of a Woman
depends far less on the strategies of fiction than
Caged Bird
did; there is less use of dialogue and less reliance on dramatic episodes to convey action or emotion. Angelou unfolds the events affecting her in a more confident, less
troubled manner. The young mother is now older and wiser, more capable of dealing with matters still confronting her.

Although she remains to some degree distressed by the challenges of parenting, personal development, and survival, she nonetheless demonstrates significant growth in these areas. Part of her development comes from her political commitment. Her growing self-assurance, strengthened by her friendships within the Harlem Writers Guild and relationships with Godfrey Cambridge, Martin Luther King Jr., and other public figures, leads to her participation in African American and African protest rallies. Angelou attends a huge march in New York following the death of Prime Minister Lumumba, of Zaire. She also does fund-raising and organizational projects for Dr. King. Although the narrator repeats and improvises on earlier motifs,
The Heart of a Woman
is considerably more uplifting than its predecessors, all of which ended with Angelou questioning her authenticity and her status as a woman who let her singing career interfere with her duties as a mother. Her apparent resolution to the mother/child conflict was to subordinate the maternal self to the needful child. In the fourth autobiography there is a significant new direction in Angelou's story. She has gone from childbirth at the end of
Caged Bird
to fragmented chaos and pain in being a mother in
Gather Together
and
Singin' and Swingin'
to a volume that for the first time affirms the achievement of a personal and public maturity.

What is more,
The Heart of a Woman
Angelou enlarges the scope of autobiography in both form and content, providing it with a fourth dimension. By adding a fourth book to the series, she has conceived a multivolume narrative structure unsurpassed in American autobiography. In presenting herself as a mature individual, Angelou approximates the perspective of classic American autobiography as described in
Chapter 2
, in which works by Benjamin Franklin, Henry Adams, and others are said to provide models for successful living. In the fourth volume, Angelou, no longer a threatened Southern child, no longer a deluded prostitute or a fledgling dancer, is now in the position to offer direction to black women and men younger than herself, to be a model like many autobiographers before her. Where she differs from most male narrators, though, is that she is a “woman” with a woman's “heart.” As such, Angelou is able to offer a woman's perspective as she reveals her concerns about her self-image and her conflicting feelings about her son and her lovers.

In the fourth segment of the six-part life story,
The Heart of a Woman
fulfills the mother/son narrative. Rich in theme and characterization, it represents the point of view of a prominent African American woman whose talents are in the service of humanity. She is engaged in the civil rights
movement, in political protest, in feminism, yet Angelou is also at her most introspective.
The Heart of a Woman
is an open, revelatory book; Angelou's feelings dictate the form. According to Dolly A. McPherson,
The Heart of a Woman
is an intensely truthful volume: “Her writing here, describing her longings, doubts, and shortcomings, is raw, bare honesty” (1990, 98).

Like all of Angelou's narratives, the structure of
The Heart of a Woman
is based on a journey, from place to place, from house to house, from coast to coast. To emphasize the theme of movement, she opens the text by quoting from a spiritual that repeats the line: “The ole ark's a-moverin.'” The repeated reference to Noah's ark, an allusion to the biblical narrative and to Angelou's secret pursuit of Christianity in
Singin' and Swingin'
, also heralds the motif of the journey. By implication, Maya Angelou is a new Noah, “a moverin' along” in the quest to survive, much as Janie Crawford, the powerful central woman character of Zora Neale Hurston's
Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), is a reincarnation of Noah in her survival of the flooding of Lake Okechobee (Lupton 1982, 52).

On the first page of
The Heart of a Woman
Angelou makes a number of references to moving, as in her mention of Jack Kerouac's 1951 novel
On the Road
. Kerouac (1922–1969) was one of the writers of the Beat Generation, a group that included such renowned figures as poet Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) and novelist William Burroughs (1914–1997). Angelou recalls in
The Heart of a Woman
that Ginsberg was reading poetry in a coffeehouse next door to the nightclub where she was performing. Like him, she saw San Francisco as a proving ground for her talent.

On the Road
was an explosive autobiographical novel about Kerouac's travels westward with Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassidy, 1926–1968), a fast driver and aspiring writer from Denver.
On the Road
became the supreme testimony to hip traveling in the 1950s. In
Heart of a Woman
Angelou compares the uncertainty of Kerouac's novel to life in America: Although we were traveling, we knew neither our “destination nor our arrival date” (3).

Thus, in these early pages, travel is connected to literary figures and uncertainty, to not knowing what is going to happen or when. The idea of indecision that Angelou so skillfully inserts into the beginning of her text diminishes as the story continues. As she moves from one setting to the next, staying nowhere for long and nowhere for certain, Angelou orchestrates the journey, moving the action back and forth in a spiral pattern with herself at the center. Like Noah, she has the stamina to stay afloat.

The journey outlined in
The Heart of a Woman
ends in the West African country of Ghana, a location that marks the end of
All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes
as well. In these two volumes, in spite of the geographical sweep of the narrative, Angelou has settled down and has moved from without to within. Although there is, as in the other texts, a narrative journey, the journey in
The Heart of a Woman
involves a voyage into her iconic self as she discovers the power of her language.

Unlike fictional forms such as the novel or the short story, the plot in autobiographies focuses on the revelation of character rather than on the development of a line of action. Further, the narrator of most autobiographies is more intent on exploring personal relationships than in plunging his or her characters into actions or escapades. Add these complications to the unusual, multilayered form of serial autobiography, with its mass of allusions to past situations, characters, and locations, and the non-plot thickens.

The incidents in
The Heart of a Woman
have fewer emotional disruptions than in the three earlier autobiographies. As an actress in Jean Genet's play
The Blacks
and as a political organizer in Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, she achieves a level of competence not evident in the earlier volumes. She becomes more certain in her mothering, now that Guy is an adolescent. She promises herself to give up major tours, and finds fulfillment in her New York/Brooklyn environment. Angelou's professional activities are suddenly interrupted when in 1961 she meets a South African, Vusumzi Make. At Vus's insistence they pretend they are married (133). The new husband goes to Cairo; Maya and Guy soon join him. The so-called marriage goes poorly, mainly because of money problems and Vus's promiscuity. The fourth volume ends with Angelou and Vus divorced and with mother and son en route to Liberia when Guy is seriously injured in a car accident.

Like all of the autobiographies in the series,
The Heart of a Woman
begins by creating a mood or an atmosphere into which the changing narrator is reintroduced. The fourth volume immediately places the story within a racial framework, with references to the military protection of Little Rock schoolchildren, to the blocking of a civil rights bill by South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, and to other pertinent examples of the racist climate
to which Angelou returns after a year in Europe performing in
Porgy and Bess
. As the story opens, she and Guy have moved from the security of Vivian Baxter's home to a houseboat near San Francisco that they share with four whites. Usually distrustful of white people, she is now, during the loose and free 1960s, part of an experimental gathering that she calls the “beatnik brigade.” Her connection to her white roommates parallels her affinities with Kerouac, Ginsberg, and other liberated white writers of the 1950s.

However, Angelou is still somewhat distrustful, and it shows through in indirect ways. She does not describe either her character or the characters of her roommates in a positive way; in fact, she barely describes them at all. In her remembrance of those “beatnik” days she provides the professions of her roommates—“an ichthyologist [a scientist who studies fish], a musician, a wife, and an inventor” (4)—and their race. But she never names or characterizes the people with whom she lives for almost a year, even though “naming” has been an important process in Angelou's upbringing, ever since Mrs. Cullinan so angers Maya by calling her Mary in
Caged Bird
that “Mary” deliberately breaks the nasty white woman's favorite casserole. As autobiographer, Angelou hastily bypasses the year on the houseboat, giving the impression that it was either too unpleasant, or too embarrassing, or too trivial to recollect; it was, however, a necessary rite of passage in an era when the relationship between blacks and whites became looser, especially in large, “hip” areas like San Francisco.

While Angelou is not altogether satisfied with the integrated living situation and the communal structure of the houseboat, she is a long way from the experience of estrangement depicted at the beginning of her earlier volumes. On the houseboat she relaxes and becomes imaginative with her hairstyle and clothing. She particularly enjoys the experiment because her roommates neither ignore Maya's and Guy's skin color nor do they romanticize it. Angelou's brief stay in a commune reveals her capacity for cooperation and anticipates her later group involvements with writers, actors, professors, expatriates, and civil rights workers.

Within a year, Angelou, tired of sharing space, craves privacy. She attempts, without initial success, to rent a small house in a segregated white neighborhood. The house, insists the landlord, is “taken.” Angelou seeks the help of some white friends, who pretend that the house is for them. Although the landlord finally concedes, the theme of racial discrimination is in the forefront during the early part of the book. At times Angelou cheerfully coexists with white people, but at other times, as in the case of the landlord, she encounters prejudice similar to the episodes in
I Know Why the Caged Bird
Sings
, when the brazen children taunted Momma Henderson, or in
Gather Together in My Name
, when the saleswoman in Stamps insults Maya.

Similarly, Guy experiences racial discrimination from the staff of the white school he is attending. He is accused of using foul language in front of some girls on the school bus. When Angelou questions him, she learns that Guy rather tactlessly told them where babies come from. When he informed the innocent girls about their parents' role in making babies, they started to cry. Maya, who visits the school to discuss the problem, is once again confronted with racist attitudes; she is told that “we do not allow Negro boys to use foul language in front of our girls” (19). The teachers' attitudes were having a negative impact on her son.

Soon afterward mother and son move to a mixed neighborhood. Guy is overjoyed to see black children playing in the street. Maya becomes more relaxed in these circumstances. She begins to write sketches, songs, and stories. Luckily, she meets African American novelist John Killens, who is in California writing a screenplay from one of his novels,
Youngblood
. Killens reads through her material, urging her to come to New York, where she will get feedback from other aspiring black writers.

The first dramatic change in Maya's character in
The Heart of a Woman
occurs when mother and son move to New York, where she and Guy live with John and Grace Killens and their family in Brooklyn until they find an apartment of their own. Guy is at first skeptical and disapproving, but they soon settle in—attending school, meeting neighbors, grappling with the differences they discover in leaving the West for the East. Angelou now seems confident in her lifestyle, her self-assurance deriving in part from the close relationships she is able to form with black singers, actors, and writers. It is not until this volume that Angelou, for the first time in the autobiographical series, begins to identify herself as a writer. Readers can actually envision the distinguished artist who will become Dr. Maya Angelou of Wake Forest University.

Early in the volume she mentions that she has begun to write poetry and short fiction. In a marvelous episode, Angelou describes attending a workshop of the Harlem Writers Guild where she engages in a difficult procedure: a first reading of her play, “One Love, One Life,” followed by a not very flattering critique by the authors who attended. John Killens, trying to soften the blow to her writer's ego, tells her that the next time will be easier.

Determined to succeed, Angelou turned writing into an act of mental discipline. She forced herself to concentrate on details and to understand the technical aspects of the craft. Through the eventual encouragement that she received from the Harlem Writer's Guild, she grew as a writer and as a person.
Angelou meshed her character with this group of African American and Caribbean writers more experienced than she, people who, like her, would someday make meaningful contributions to literature. John Killens, the member of the group most connected to Angelou's personal life, had at the time of their first meeting written
Youngblood
(1954). Sarah Wright was the author of the acclaimed novel
This Child's Gonna Live
(1969), a potent testimony to black female survival. Rosa Guy, who protected Maya during stormy premarital clashes with Vus Make, became her close friend in
A Song Flung Up to Heaven
; Rosa Guy was the author of
A Measure in Time
(1983) and other works of fiction. The Caribbean writer Paule Marshall—one of the most successful at the Harlem Writers Guild and now considered a major American novelist—was delighted to learn that her novel
Brown Girl, Brown Stones
(1959) was being made into a movie for television.