Maya Angelou (21 page)

The author illustrated her theme of the journey when she alluded to the tortured condition of her friend and burn-victim Betty Shabazz, whose doctors could not understand her phenomenal fight against death. We need to learn from her struggle, Angelou commented about the widow of Malcolm X: “But there's something about the journey, the onerous climb. It may be part of the lesson to learn. I imagine that each of us is on a journey” (“Icon” 1997).

So varied a set of journeys helps create the sense of flux or change in the series. Imagine that Maya had stayed in Stamps, Arkansas, for her entire life, had gotten a job as a school teacher, and had married the manager of the lumber mill. Although there might still be an autobiography as intense as
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
, it would have ended there and would not have become a series, a structure that is dependent on changes in setting, values, and culture.

The plot of
Singin' and Swingin'
is not a progressive action from beginning to end, like the plot of a standard novel, but rather a sequence of conflicts or oppositions that emerge, recede, and often disappear from the text, only to be revived pages later in a different form.

The construction of the plot of Angelou's third autobiography is best described as the effective placement of opposing incidents and attitudes.
Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas
explores a variety of issues affecting Angelou's life—motherhood, making a living, being a wife, being a grandchild. In almost every instance Angelou's attitude toward these and other issues is ambivalent, what some people call the “Yes, But Syndrome” and others the “Affirmation/Denial Syndrome.”

At the beginning of the volume, Angelou is in her twenties, struggling to provide herself and her son with fundamental needs but unwilling to go on welfare. She is offered a job selling records. At the shop she meets a Greek sailor whose knowledge of black music is equal to her own. She wants to marry him, but she is suspicious. He is white but he is also Greek. She marries him but there are conflicts. They divorce.

Angelou's great love is for her son Guy, but she also needs a chance for her career to grow. She leaves Guy with her mother, Vivian Baxter, and dances in Europe, Yugoslavia, and Egypt. But while she is overseas she always misses her son. Vivian tells Maya that she has taken a job as a dealer in Las Vegas and that there's no one to care for Guy. Maya leaves the tour, giving one month's notice, although she wants to stay. At the end she is reunited with her son, but he is sick. They go to Hawaii together. The story is finished.

This skeletal summary of the plot demonstrates how the patterns of affirmation and denial protrude from the flesh of the autobiography, advancing the plot while at the same time retarding it. The pattern of “yes, buts” or denials is the bare bones of the plot. Once the reader recognizes what Angelou is doing, sometimes with awareness, sometimes not, he or she will gain a new appreciation for her dialectical method—a critical term to indicate a construction or arrangement based on a conflict of opposites. This dialectic is particularly relevant to the characterization of black motherhood, introduced in the childhood narrative but finding its fullest expression in
Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas
.

The term
conflict of opposites
appropriately describes the character development in
Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas
. Character development in a standard, single-volume autobiography reflects a clear and consistent pattern of behavior that shows growth and change in the narrator from the beginning until the conclusion. In Angelou's extended series, however, the central character, rather than being a self-directed
autobiographer, frequently demonstrates qualities of self-negation/self-acceptance as she vacillates back and forth between denying and accepting herself. This wavering of character from one volume to another is most extreme in
Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas
, where Maya's personality is often ambiguous—uncertain, indefinite, and unsettled. And yet, it is because of these negative characteristics that Angelou engages readers in the awesome reality of her personality. She is a woman who dramatically demonstrates that the self-conscious narrator can be aware of her mistakes.

In the construction of an autobiography, character and plot are almost inseparable. The character of the narrator is married to the plot as decisions are made or postponed, unions are done or undone, and children are sent away or kept at one's side. Both Angelou and the other characters in
Singin' and Swingin'
often surmount the oppositional forces that divide them. Indeed, there are moments of exhilaration. But even her great success in
Singin' and Swingin'
, the
Porgy and Bess
tour, for example, has its down side.

The elation implied in the title is contradicted by other, discordant experiences that play for and against each other in the formation of Angelou's character. Confused and uncentered, she is forced to make a number of choices concerning her mothering, her profession, and her sexuality. Her character develops as she confronts these choices, which involve the people she is closest to: her son, her grandmother, her mother, her brother, her husband, herself.

The first significant circumstance affecting her character is her relationship with Tosh Angelos. Maya meets her husband-to-be early in the third autobiography. Impressed by the young sailor's enthusiasm for jazz, she introduces him to Guy, who is immediately won over. Vivian Baxter is not. She warns Maya against marrying Tosh because he is a “poor white man” (24). Maya, though, evades that problem by telling herself that Tosh is really Greek, not white.

The marriage is initially satisfying, but eventually Maya begins to resent Tosh's demands that she stay at home and be the perfect housewife, the provider of suitable meals and “fabulous jello desserts” (26). She is also bothered by what she senses as disapproval from her friends because of the interracial marriage. As Tosh takes greater control of her life, Maya, who “mistakes prison for security,” does little to challenge his authority (McPherson 1990, 83).

The conflict between Maya and Tosh centers on two issues: gender roles and religion. When Tosh tells Guy that there is no God, Maya is furious.
She reacts by secretly visiting black churches, searching for the faith she left behind in Stamps with Momma Henderson. She is also looking for a way to get back at Tosh. Her quest ends in her conversion at the Evening Star Baptist Church, in one of the first great celebrations of African American culture in the series. The shouts, gospels, spirituals, “polyrhythmic” clapping of hands all converge on Angelou “like sweet oil” as she shakes with elation (28).

The religious transformation, like the marriage, is short-lived. The differences between Maya and Tosh grow until one day he says he's “tired of being married” (37). In a quiet rage that lasts for several pages, Maya ponders the issue of race, fantasizing that Tosh is a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Using her sexuality as revenge, she goes to a bar, gets smashed, and spends the night with an older man, knowing that Guy will be safe with his stepfather. When she returns home her attitude toward Tosh has changed. She is no longer the perfect housewife, cook, or cooperative lover. Maya loses her affection for him, and the marriage of nearly three years collapses.

The second struggle that strongly influences her character is the conflict within the family: between Maya and her son Guy; between Maya and her mother; between Maya and her paternal grandmother. The mother/son conflict is intensified by Maya's guilt over not being a responsible mother. Social standards determine that a good mother is faithful and ever-caring. Social standards dictate that a good mother is one who sacrifices her own happiness for that of her child, who makes no move that disrupts her child's friendships or schooling.

The complicated issue of motherhood is a unifying but also a disruptive theme throughout the series and one that receives its own treatment in the Thematic Issues section of this chapter. In terms of character development, the mother/child opposition is an essential aspect of Angelou's growth. She said in an interview that “the absolutely greatest thing that happened to me was my son, because I had to grow and learn not to smother him” (Toppman 1989, 144). She seems to be searching for the right balance: neither smothering nor slighting him. Because of her year's absence from Guy, Maya suffers during the primary action of the volume, the company tour of
Porgy and Bess
. When the tour is over, Maya makes a vow to her son never to leave him again. On that promise the book ends.

Maya's relationship with her mother, Vivian Baxter, takes on new dimensions in
Singin' and Swingin'
. Recall that at the end of
Gather Together in My Name
, Maya had returned to Vivian and Daddy Clidell for comfort, love, and lodging. When the subsequent volume,
Singin' and Swingin'
, opens, Maya is living an impoverished but independent life. She and Guy
again return to the protection of her mother and stepfather's house on the condition that Maya pays a fair share of the expenses. Although happy with this arrangement, she is forced to retract it when, against Vivian's advice, she marries Tosh.

A few years later, following the divorce and the invitation to perform in
Porgy and Bess
, Maya relies on Vivian to take care of Guy while she is on tour. At this point Maya becomes aware of the comparison between Vivian, who left her children with their grandmother in Stamps, and Maya, who left her child with his grandmother in San Francisco. She is in effect echoing her own unhealthy child/mother experience, not because she wants to but because, despite the pain, she has to work. In a promise to herself that does not quite ring true, she claims: “I would make it up to my son and one day would take him to all the places I was going to see” (129).

In a further imitation of her mother, the absent Maya sends money to Vivian from Paris, asking her to buy Guy a present but to tell him his mother had sent it: “Then perhaps he would forgive my absence” (157). Maya thus copies her mother's actions when in
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Vivian sends her daughter the hateful blonde doll that she subsequently destroys. While she is very much indebted to her mother for being willing to care for Guy while she is in Europe, the downside of such well-meaning child care is that Maya starts feeling guilty. She confesses that she sends home most of her pay to support her son and to “assuage my guilt at being away from him” (153).

A third confrontation, this one with her grandmother, Annie Henderson, is discreetly presented. The conflict occurs outside of the narrative, after Tosh informs Maya of Annie's death, to which she reacts in a dazzling passage three paragraphs long. Momma, the foremost influence in Maya's development, vanishes from her autobiographies—no longer able to comfort Maya or introduce Guy to the church; no longer able to caution her about racism. Momma Henderson's death is a major source for the feelings of futility in
Singin' and Swingin'
. The death of Maya's grandmother underscores a problem that Angelou never seems fully to come to terms with in the autobiographical series: her ambivalent feelings toward those she loves.

In writing about her grandmother's death, Angelou shifts from her generally more conversational tone and becomes passionate, religious, emotional: “Ah, Momma,” she cries, lamenting that even if she were as “pure” as the Virgin Mary, she would never feel Momma Henderson's hands touch her face again (41). This moving farewell is not typical of Angelou's writing. Her words here betray a conflict, as if she is trying too hard, as if her guilt at having forgotten Momma is causing excessive emotions. The three-paragraph passage is a funeral elegy, a prose poem, a gem cemented
within the narrative. As a poem, it relies on gospel tradition, on the language of Bible stories, and on certain African American literary texts, especially James Weldon Johnson's “Go Down Death—A Funeral Sermon” (1966).

Angelou's farewell to her black grandmother in this passage contains other refrains from the past. She longs to have Momma's “rough slow hands pat my cheek” (41). In terms of conflict, these hands are the ones that slapped Maya on the face for having sassed two white saleswomen in
Gather Together
. That slap, the bad slap that ended Maya's relationship with Momma, is changed in the funeral elegy to a good slap, a soft tap on the cheek. The two different slaps are a perfect example of what has been described as the conflict of opposites, frequently stated in
Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas
—the good/bad mother. Angelou's lament throughout these paragraphs softens, as she expresses the wish to be “as good as God's angels” and as “pure as the Mother of Christ.” Both metaphors are aspects of the good/bad conflict, in which Angelou attempts to deal with her guilt toward her grandmother and seek a loving reconciliation, if not here, then in the Hereafter.

In
Singin' and Swingin'
Angelou is extremely quiet not only about her grandmother's death but also about the fate of her brother, Bailey Johnson. In both cases she delegates a major autobiographical relationship to a private, unreachable place. As if to emphasize her distance from Bailey, Maya mentions the letters he sends her from prison while she is in Europe, which Maya shares with her mother on her return to America. Maya remarks coldly that his touching stories about life in prison “left me unmoved” (233). That she is “unmoved” is at least one solution to the problem of the conflict of opposites, for if one feels nothing there is no conflict. One imagines that Angelou, after her shocking collision with drugs and drug addicts at the end of
Gather Together
, would like to put those experiences behind her. But Angelou says that the minimal information regarding Bailey is protective. She is doing what he asked: “Don't use my name in books.” She added, “I am also silent for his protection” (“Icon” 1997).