Maya Angelou (22 page)

Bailey is again mentioned near the end of
Singin' and Swingin'
, where Angelou confesses that he is in Sing Sing prison for “fencing stolen goods” (234). She does not communicate with him directly but mentions to Martin Luther King Jr. that her brother is in jail. Dr. King advises her to keep on loving her brother, reminding her that Bailey has more freedom of spirit than those who imprisoned him. Bailey is resurrected in the sixth autobiography,
A Song Flung Up to Heaven
, where he plays a major role in comforting Maya, much as he had done in childhood.

One final area of conflict for Angelou—and in many ways the primary one—is her interior struggle as she attempts to identify her life and desires
and defend them against demands from the outside. It has been a hard struggle getting recognition as a dancer, something she has been trying to do since she was part of the dancing team of Poole and Rita. Aware that she has talent, Maya has been unlucky at finding a job in the entertainment business that will offer decent pay and some respectability. She had been dancing in bars and strip joints as artistic backup for the more exotic showgirls. She had put in time as a B-girl—a woman who entices men to buy her watered-down bar drinks or cheap champagne at high prices. As in
Gather Together
, these scenes of the low life provide glimpses of a seedy underworld as Angelou wears sequined G-strings and the text approaches pornography, so stimulating is Angelou's language and descriptive power.

Maya is performing an assortment of dances and ballads in local cafes, including the calypso, a popular kind of rhythmic music that originated in Trinidad in the West Indies. Her big break comes when, at the intervention of some friends, she is invited to perform calypso music at the Purple Onion, a cabaret in the North Beach section of San Francisco, where at one point she shares the show with comedian Phyllis Diller. Following the successful stint at the Purple Onion, she receives other offers, including the tempting proposal to replace Eartha Kitt in the 1954 musical,
New Faces
. She accepts instead the primary dancing role in
Porgy and Bess
for its European engagement of 1954–1955. This is a true victory, the foundation for her later performances in dance, theater, and song.

The strain of the
Porgy and Bess
tour takes away from Maya emotionally almost as much as it gives her professionally. Dolly A. McPherson writes that
Porgy and Bess
is like an “antagonist that enthralls Angelou, beckoning and seducing her away from her responsibilities” (1990, 85). McPherson's use of the word
antagonist
captures the oppositional aspect of the European tour and its strain on Angelou's loyalties. Sometimes an antagonist is not a person but instead an internal conflict that exists within an individual. This distinction is applicable to Angelou's internal, at-war personality.

The European travel sequence has a great effect on both plot and character as Maya's absence generates a tug-of-war between Guy at home and his mother in Europe. Travel is a magnet that contributes to the overall tension of the narrative, a tension that momentarily ends with Maya's return to her son. When she arrives home after an exhausting boat and train trip, she learns that Guy is suffering from a skin disease that appears to have emotional causes. Promising never to leave him again, she takes him with her to Hawaii, where she has a singing engagement. In the last pages of
Singin' and Swingin'
, Angelou vows to Guy that she will never leave him, using words that are both simple and oppositional: “If I go, you'll go with me or I won't go” (232).

This volume closes in a sentence that highlights, through three nouns, the opposing tensions of Angelou's temperament: “Although I was not a great singer I was his mother, and he was my wonderful, dependently independent son” (242). Again, the dialectical construct is apparent: I/you; singer/mother; dependent/independent; mother/son. This sentence effectively concludes the first three books in its thumbnail summary of the major contradictions in Angelou's character. At the same time, it alludes to similar mother/son patterns in future volumes.

Angelou's writing in the third volume is brilliant, its strength deriving in part from the way in which she duplicates the actual conflicts underlying the plot, characters, and thought patterns. This kind of development is also found in
Hunger of Memory
(1982), an autobiography by Mexican American writer Richard Rodriguez, who examines the opposition between his Catholic-Mexican family and his alienated, Anglo-centered education. Maxine Hong Kingston's
Woman Warrior
(1976) also looks deeply into class and familial conflicts in the clash between her Chinese and American upbringing. Not many other contemporary autobiographers have been able to capture, either in a single volume or in a series, the opposition of desires that is found in
Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas
and, to a far lesser extent, in Angelou's other volumes.

The theme of maturing motherhood evolves in the second volume,
Gather Together
, and continues in
Singin' and Swingin'
. The thematic issues of both volumes remain similar as Maya faces comparable problems of parenting, relationships, and survival. All are pertinent to her role as a single black mother determined to make a life for herself and her son against a stacked deck—against the obstacles of race and gender that for women in the 1950s were in some cases insurmountable. Much of Maya's struggle in this, the most tangled of the autobiographies, concerns her private role as a single mother versus her public role as a committed actress, one whose career makes it necessary to leave Guy for long stretches of time.

Chosen to perform in the European tour of
Porgy and Bess
, she faces the realization that in leaving Guy with his grandmother, she will repeat the hateful pattern established by her parents when they left her and Bailey in the hands of Momma Henderson. Her feelings are compounded by the fact that, as a young, black, single mother, she bears the ultimate responsibility for her son, whom she wants and needs to support. By identifying the most fundamental conflict between working and mothering, Angelou presents
a rare kind of literary model, the working mother. This kind of model is becoming more and more essential as women insist on both roles.

The mother/son behavior pattern in
Singin' and Swingin'
shows Guy as the son seeking affection and Maya as the mother in conflict over the need to love versus the need to be a fully realized person. This conflict, as we saw earlier in the chapter, causes stress and indecision. One expects Maya, lead dance performer of the
Porgy and Bess
tour of Europe and North Africa, to enjoy what her labor has earned. Instead, on almost every page of description about Milan, Paris, or Venice, there appears a lament about Guy that shuts off her positive experiences. On seeing French children playing outside the train window, she writes: “The longing for my own son threatened to engulf me” (191). When she comes home to discover Guy's skin scaling from disease she says, “I had ruined my beautiful son by neglect, and neither of us would ever forgive me” (233).

It is not until she takes Guy to Hawaii that mother and son get a clearer perspective. She is his mother and she is a celebrity. He is her son and he needs her nurturing. Although Angelou avoids a fairytale-perfect ending, she gives readers, at this middle stage of her autobiographical series, a glimmer of the Maya Angelou to come and a tangible sense of the personal price she has paid for the opportunity. Although at the end of
Singin' and Swingin'
her exploration of the rewards and pains of motherhood appears to have been temporarily resolved, Angelou continues to unfold the tensions between career and motherhood in the remaining volumes.

Directly and indirectly related to the motherhood issue is the theme of music.
Music
is the first word: “Music was my refuge” (1). As the word
music
opens the narrative, the idea of song (singin') and dance (swingin') dominates the title. Then, as if to leave no doubt in the reader's mind about the importance of music, Angelou introduces the volume with an epigraph, as she had introduced
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
with the line: “What you looking at me for?” An epigraph is a short poem or prose piece which sets the tone of the work that follows, usually by making a connection to the theme.

In
Singin' and Swingin'
, the epigraph is a quotation from an unidentified three-line stanza in classic blues form. For the first two lines, the blues singer asks if the moon is lonesome. The third line asks: “Don't your house look lonesome when your baby / pack up to leave?” In conventional blues, the word
baby
means lover. In this case however, Angelou changes the usual meaning to refer to her leaving Guy for a job in Europe, and to leaving her mother for an independent life. The poignant words and rhythms are related to at least three of the major themes of the third
autobiography—motherhood, separation, and music. In terms of genre, it is important to note that music, not poetry or fiction, introduces the reader to the narrative.

The lonely Maya, who initially finds solace in the cool notes of black music, later in the same volume discovers that music offers her economic opportunity and the chance to be married. Her first daytime job is in a music store. She meets Tosh Angelos while selling records, falling for him when she discovers that his love for Charlie Parker, Dexter Gordon, and other jazz musicians is genuine. Later Maya excels in her singing and dancing performances, winning engagements in quality clubs because of her accomplishments in music.

The structure of
Singin' and Swingin'
is related to musical composition. By looking at the doubling of plot lines (Maya the mother/Maya the B-girl) as being associated with Angelou's use of opposition—pitting one force (good mother) against another, contrasting force (bad mother)—it is possible to see that Angelou uses certain kinds of music, especially jazz, that are based on similar oppositions. Such music is “polyphonic,” where more than one line works in opposition to another. In
Singin' and Swingin'
certain perplexing issues touch each other and disconnect, so that the overall effect resembles a jazz composition. Angelou's narrative is constantly playing certain discordant or polyphonic notes. Thus, Vivian Baxter's dominant tones are pitted against her daughter's more tentative ones, or Tosh's loud cursing contends against Maya's silent rage.

The use of music is also effective in the funeral sermon for Momma Henderson. Angelou's sad notes are heard as she struggles to record the death of her now silent grandmother. To produce the desired effect, she uses the tones of the Negro spiritual to reach into eternity for her grandmother. At the end of the sermon Angelou cries that death is real “only in song” (42). Although such attention to music is observable in each of the volumes, it is only in
Singin' and Swingin'
and
Gather Together
that the musical theme affects the development of plot, structure, and character.

Angelou achieves her powerful effects in
Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas
through a number of literary devices. First is her use of repetition. Angelou uses the current time period, the 1950s, to reflect on earlier events, repeating certain details in order to enhance the style. The most dramatic use of repetition is Angelou's leaving her son with Vivian Baxter, repeating the incident from her childhood when Vivian left
Maya and Bailey with Momma Henderson. Another example is Maya's turning to an older man in the bar for sympathy during a crisis, as she had turned to her older lover, Troubadour Martin, in
Gather Together
. From a psychological perspective, she may be repeating her need for Bailey Johnson Sr., the father who once abandoned her. Her technique is reinforced through repeating certain words such as “confront” (43), “the past” (129), and “absence” (156).

Another stylistic technique that Angelou puts to excellent use is the simile, a comparison between two objects that is directly expressed through the presence of the words
like
or
as
. Although there are a number of similes in
Singin' and Swingin'
, several deserve special attention. First is the explosion of images surrounding her religious conversion where, in a further reference to the theme of music, she describes the Negro spirituals as “sweeter than sugar.” Angelou further expands this straightforward simile into an elaborate image of her connections to the oral tradition of black culture. In other words, much of African American tradition derives from slave narratives and gospels (see
Chapter 2
). In this image of sugar, Angelou's connection to her oral heritage is through her mouth—what she speaks, what she sings, and what she tastes. She praises the spirituals she heard during her conversion: “I wanted to keep my mouth full of them” (28). This image of fullness contrasts with Vivian Baxter's empty mouth in
Caged Bird
—Maya's fantasy of a dead Vivian, her face a vast empty O, and Maya's tears “like warm milk” (43) in the absence of a milk-giving mother.

When Angelou returns to San Francisco near the end of the autobiography, she expresses her confusion through the use of simile: “Disorientation hung in my mind like a dense fog” (232). The fog is antithetical to her occasional moments of clarity: “clear as the clink of good crystal” (233). Through these two comparisons Angelou is exposing a mental confusion strong enough to make her hastily consult and then reject a prosperous-looking white psychiatrist.

Finally, Angelou likes to use the simile for humorous effect, especially when she is exaggerating certain clichés concerning black culture. For example, the cast of
Porgy and Bess
runs into Lionel Hampton's band at a reception in Israel. Hampton (1908–2002) was the first jazz artist to perform successfully on the vibraphone (Southern 1971, 495). Angelou writes that the cast jumped on Hampton's band members “as if they were bowls of black-eyed peas” (216). This simile reveals the racial hunger that African Americans experienced during their white engagements. The hunger motif connects the black-eyed peas simile to black-skinned people and to the mouth full of sugar used to describe the spirituals. Each takes its meaning
from an oral reference. The title of the third volume is also based on a simile:
Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry
LIKE
Christmas
.