Maya Angelou (23 page)

In
Singin' and Swingin'
, Angelou, through her care for language and style, imaginatively renders the black experience from the perspective of a mother who is also a daughter. This chapter discussed the conflicting aspects of Maya's character—her tendency to represent herself in terms of indecisiveness or uncertainty. Emphasis on these conflicts is a modest form of deconstructive criticism.

Deconstruction is a field of criticism heavily grounded in the linguistic theories of French philosophers Fernand de Saussure and Jacques Derrida, and has been practiced by American critics such as Barbara Johnson and J. Hillis Miller. One of the main assumptions of deconstruction is that language in itself has no fixed meaning, that a word or words have significance only as they are different from other words surrounding them. Therefore, it is necessary to give a work of literature—a novel, a poem, an autobiography—what is called a “close reading,” the kind of probing verbal analysis that until the 1960s had been generally reserved for poetry. A close reading invariably leads the deconstructionist to the conclusion that the author has no claim to what the piece of writing means, that the text has no authority, and that there can be many, many meanings to words, none of them right and none of them wrong.

A critic committed to deconstruction scrutinizes the language of
Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas
, looking for evidence of uncertainty, of multiple meanings. Words, passages, and episodes are interpreted in a multitude of ways because the words of the text lean toward ambiguity and are therefore open to a deconstructive reading. The most radical application of the theory is that the deconstruction of the text has already happened before the critic approaches the material. The critic realizes that the “construct, by its very nature, has already undone, dismantled, or deconstructed itself” (Harmon and Holman 1996, 142).

A deconstructive reading of
Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas
might first consider the title, which in its complexity of language reflects a multitude of meanings related to the text. The title is ironic, meaning that the “actual intent is expressed in words that carry the opposite meaning” (Harmon and Holman 1996, 277). It is composed of what might be assumed are positive words:
singin'
,
swingin'
,
Merry
,
Christmas
. But on closer inspection, singing and swinging are words that depict Angelou's
career, words that at times signify success but at other times create such a vast distance and separation between herself and her son that when she returned home from Europe she contemplated “killing herself and possibly even the child” (234).

Although
Merry
and
Christmas
initially reflect happiness, these words, too, must be seen ironically as expressing the opposite meaning.
Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas
is Angelou's most unmerry autobiography. The reader who tries to understand the series as a whole may recall another Christmas and the bitter scene from
Caged Bird
in which the absent mother, Vivian Baxter, sends her black child a tea set and a blonde-haired white doll (just as the absent Maya sends Vivian money from Paris to purchase Guy a present in
Singin' and Swingin'
). Angelou writes that the next day she and her brother ripped the doll to shreds. These gifts appear to be metaphors for Maya's divided self, symbolized by the torn and unwanted doll. As she negates the doll, she negates her self.

In a telling passage from
The Heart of a Woman
, she uses a comparably negative scene in identifying the joys of Christmas when, at her first meeting of the Harlem Writers Guild, she was devastated by a group critique of her play. The judges attacked her and damaged her ego, but “now they were as cheery as Christmas cards” (40). Another pun on the word
Christmas
appears in
Gather Together in My Name
. Maya is talking to a prostitute who's “off the streets” because she was too hot. The woman says she's cooling down. “Then I'll be back switching and bitching and getting merry like Christmas” (137). The parallel between the whore's bragging in
Gather Together
in 1974 and Angelou's title in
Singin' and Swingin'
, published four years later, is unmistakable.

There are several other associations between the title
Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas
and the series. The word
merry
is a homonym, a word that is identical in pronunciation to another word but that has a different origin and meaning. “Merry” has the same sound as “Mary,” a name with rich associations. In
Caged Bird
. Maya is horribly offended when the white woman she works for, Mrs. Cullinan, keeps calling her “Mary” and not by her right name. One will also recall the significance of Big Mary Dalton in
Gather Together
. She is the babysitter who separates Maya from her son by kidnapping him. In
Singin' and Swingin'
Mary, the Mother of Christ, is the pure virgin of Maya's dreams. For each of these three Marys there are surrounding implications of ambivalence and denial.

Two final suggestions come to mind in a deconstructive reading. First, Angelou intentionally changes the
ing
endings that indicate the present participle in standard English. In transforming the standard spellings into the
slangy “singin',” “swingin',” and “gettin',” she jazzes up the verbs, much like Henry Louis Gates Jr. does throughout his study of the “signifyin(g) monkey” (1988). Both writers create the sense of the black vernacular, the sound of a down home blues singer, by dropping the formal
g
. Second is Angelou's concern that her brother Bailey is in prison, namely, Sing Sing. The
ing
sounds call Sing Sing to mind, if only in the ironic name of the prison: Sing Sing is an unmerry place to be.

Angelou had an understandably different interpretation of the title. She told an interviewer that the title
Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas
derived from rent parties, Saturday night survival parties popular in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s. People paid their host a quarter, then ate, drank, and were merry for the weekend. They would “sing and swing and get merry like Christmas” (Angelou, quoted in Saunders 1991, 6).

Rent parties, also called “parlor socials,” were swinging and merry, full of fun and dance. Looking at the economic implications of rent parties, they were mainly attended by “laundry workers, seamstresses, porters, elevator operators,” and other members of the working class who could not afford or could not have been admitted to the “classier Harlem night spots” (Jervis Anderson 1981, 152–53). Indications of desperate economic conditions, rent parties offered black musicians a place to be heard and were, according to Anderson, not native to Harlem but the continuation of a Southern tradition. The concept of the rent party helps describe Angelou's position in volumes 2 and 3: she is a single mother from the South who goes to California and sings and swings for a living. She entertains others for little money as a singer, B-girl, and dancer, without getting very merry at all.

Not until years later, in 1970, did Angelou find her true voice through the autobiographical narrative form. Her singing and swinging performances at the Purple Onion and her outstanding dancing in
Porgy and Bess
brought her some measure of the public recognition that would be her due in the future, following the publication of
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
. But her primary cultural role in
Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas
is as a stage performer, not as a writer. As a person who dramatized the songs and dances of the African, Caribbean, and African American oral traditions, she was giving expression to other people's words and music. Not until volume 4,
The Heart of a Woman
, does she begin the difficult task of giving voice to her own narrative.

Chapter 6

In the personal opening sequence of
The Heart of a Woman
, Angelou and her son Guy are living communally on a houseboat near San Francisco, trying to bridge the gap between black and white and living on the savings she has put away while singing in California and in Hawaii. Within a year, she and Guy move from the commune to a rented house near San Francisco and finally, in 1959, they cross the continent to New York City.

In New York, Angelou, no longer satisfied with singing in nightclubs, dedicates herself to acting, writing, political organizing, and her son. She becomes involved with Martin Luther King's growing civil rights organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), doing a significant fund-raiser for King and becoming a key organizer in his group. These activities make
The Heart of a Woman
the “most political segment of Angelou's autobiographical statement” (Cudjoe 1990, 297).

Her activities with SCLC cease shortly after Angelou meets Vusumzi Make, a handsome South African. After a wedding ceremony in London that is never legalized, Maya, Vus, and Guy move to Egypt. While living in Cairo, Maya discovers that Vus has been buying expensive items of furniture without her knowledge and that he has been unfaithful. After a public display of emotion, Maya leaves with Guy for West Africa, hoping that she might set up residence in Liberia. But en route, in Ghana, Guy is seriously injured in a car accident. On this event, which happened in 1962,
The Heart of a Woman
ends and the fifth volume,
All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes
, begins.

The Heart of a Woman
is narrated from the point of view of a mother/woman who tells much the same intimate story that she told in
Caged Bird
,
Gather Together in My Name
, and
Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas
—but with an enormous difference. By the time she is ready to present the fourth segment of her life story, Angelou has accumulated a multilayered memory that affects not only what she remembers but also what readers who have followed her previous books remember. As a serial autobiographer she must continuously look backward, unveiling the various layers hidden in earlier volumes, remembering what she has already written without being repetitious. Autobiographer Lillian Hellman named this process “pentimento,” a term used in painting to indicate the reappearance of a design that has been covered over by layers of paint.

Of the many instances in which Angelou uses this layered point of view in
The Heart of a Woman
, perhaps the most effective is the incident in which she confronts Jerry, the leader of the Savages, a Brooklyn street gang that has threatened Guy because he reportedly hit Jerry's girlfriend. Enraged, a borrowed pistol in her purse, Angelou tells Jerry that if anything happens to Guy she will shoot him and his family, kill the grandmother, kill the baby, kill anything that “moves, including the rats and cockroaches” (84). Read from a multileveled point of view, Maya's violent reaction in this episode goes back to
Caged Bird
, back to her rape, and back to the vengeful actions that Grandmother Baxter and her family took against Mr. Freeman. Her violent behavior in handling Jerry may involve an unconscious effort to rewrite her own history. She will be aggressive, like the Baxters. She will not be passive, like her paternal grandmother, Momma Henderson, who hid Uncle Willie in the potato bin when the Ku Klux Klan arrived; who hummed submissively when the three offensive white girls taunted her in front of the store; who slapped Maya and sent her away in
Gather Together
because Maya challenged a white saleswoman. Maya will do whatever it takes to protect her son. At the same time, her aggression is played out against her fear that she cannot save Guy from harm, an attitude that reveals “the vulnerability she feels as a mother trying to protect her child from any form of danger” (Neubauer 1987, 128).