Against all Odds: Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou was an accidental memoirist, though she would
eventually write six volumes about her life. She was also well known for her
poetry, singing, acting, playwriting—the list goes on and on. I once heard Dr.
Maya Angelou speak at Calvin
College, at the Festival
of Faith and Writing. She held us spellbound—in a basketball fieldhouse where
we sat uncomfortably on bleachers without any back support—yes, she had that
affect, to transport us out of our current misery and to another place. She was
an encourager.
Her personal story encompasses many lives. She was a dancer,
calypso singer, streetcar conductor, single mother, magazine editor in Cairo, administrative assistant in Ghana, friend
of James Baldwin, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, and a
Civil Rights activist. She was a chronicler of her time.
She stood up. For women, for her race, for all people. ’Cause
that’s how it is.
I Know Why the Caged
Bird Sings her first volume published in 1969 was a sensation, not because
of the prose, but because her editor didn’t think it would sell. The autobiography
of a black woman. This from the NY Times obit: The book — its title is a line
from “Sympathy,” by the African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar —
became a best seller, confounding the stereotype, pervasive in the publishing
world, that black women’s lives were rarely worthy of autobiography.”
Maybe that was her greatest achievement. Confounding others.
Yet, according the NY Times, she never set out to why
memoir.
**
Near the end of “A Song Flung Up to
Heaven,” Ms. Angelou recalls her response when Robert Loomis, who would become
her longtime editor at Random House, first asked her to write an autobiography.
Still
planning to be a playwright and poet, she demurred. Cannily, Mr. Loomis called
her again.
“You may be right not to attempt
autobiography, because it is nearly impossible to write autobiography as
literature,” he said. “Almost impossible.”
Ms. Angelou replied, “I’ll start
tomorrow.”
**
What an example of courage. Maya Angelou
was a woman who faced the blank page, it was white, but she painted it all the
colors of the rainbow with her words. Thanks.
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