Maya Angelou, the memoirist and poet whose landmark book of 1969 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – which describes in lyrical, unsparing prose the author's girlhood in the Jim Crow South – was among the first autobiographies by a 20th-century black woman to reach a wide general readership, died yesterday in her home. She was 86 and lived in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Her death was confirmed by her longtime literary agent, Helen Brann, who said Angelou had been in frail health and had had heart problems.
As well-known as she was for her memoirs, which eventually filled seven volumes, Angelou probably received her widest exposure on a chilly January day in 1993 when she delivered the inaugural poem, On the Pulse of Morning, at the swearing in of Bill Clinton, the nation's 42nd president, who, like Angelou, had grown up poor in rural Arkansas.
Long before that day, as she recounted in Caged Bird and its five 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, Dr Martin Luther King jnr and Malcolm X.
Afterwards (her six-volume memoir takes her only to the age of 40), 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 Oprah to Sesame Street; and subject of a string of scholarly studies.
In February 2011, President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honour.
In her writing, 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 clear-eyed examination of the ways in which the socially marginalising forces of racism and sexism played out at the level of the individual.
"If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat," Angelou wrote in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
Once more, with feeling
Hallmarks of Angelou’s 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 – be it Arkansas, San Francisco or the foreign cities in which she lived – with palpable feeling for its sights, sounds and smells.
Marguerite Ann Johnson was born in St Louis on April 4th, 1928. (For years after King’s assassination, on April 4th, 1968, Angelou did not celebrate her birthday.) Her dashing, defeated father, Bailey Johnson snr, a Navy dietician, “was a lonely person, searching relentlessly in bottles, under women’s skirts, in church work and lofty job titles for his ‘personal niche’, lost before birth and unrecovered since,” Angelou wrote. “How maddening it was to have been born in a cotton field with aspirations of grandeur.”
Her beautiful, volatile mother, Vivian Baxter, was variously a nurse, hotel owner and card dealer. After her parents’ marriage ended, three-year-old Maya was sent with her four-year-old brother Bailey to live with their father’s mother in the tiny town of Stamps, Arkansas, which, she later wrote, “with its dust and hate and narrowness was as South as it was possible to get”.
Their grandmother, Annie Henderson, owned a general store "in the heart of the Negro area", Angelou wrote. An upright woman known as Momma, "with her solid air packed around her like cotton," she is a warm, stabilising presence throughout I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
The children returned periodically to St Louis to live with their mother. On one such occasion, when Maya was seven or eight, she was raped by her mother’s 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 – probably, Angelou wrote, by her uncles. Believing 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.
Memoirs supreme
Her other books included volumes of poetry but she remained best known for her volumes of memoir, even though she had never set out to be a memoirist.
Angelou recalled her response when longtime editor Robert Loomis first asked her to write an autobiography. She demurred at first, still planning to be a playwright and poet. Cannily, Loomis called her again. “You may be right not to attempt autobiography, because it is nearly impossible to write autobiography as literature,” he said. “I’ll start tomorrow,” Angelou replied. – (New York Times service)