Maya Angelou (25 page)

From
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
, readers know about Angelou's devotion to writers since childhood. Her earliest literary idols were men. Although she admired women writers—Anne Spencer, Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston—she does not mention them in
Caged Bird
(“Icon” 1997). It is not until
The Heart of a Woman
that Angelou fully identifies herself with a woman writer. By taking that title from a poem by Georgia Douglas Johnson, she is including herself among a distinct tradition of women poets and novelists. Her allusion in the title to a caged black woman poet of the past is an acknowledgment to her legacy as a black woman writer, a legacy shared with Rosa Guy, Paule Marshall, and other sisters of African American and Caribbean ancestry.

These affiliations are indicative of Angelou's emerging feminism, which can be defined as a social and political response to the fact that women and men are treated unequally in society and that women are underrepresented in the arts, the sciences, the economy, and elsewhere. Angelou, in the acknowledgments to
The Heart of a Woman
, gives “Special thanks to a few of the many sister/friends whose love encourages me to spell my name: WOMAN.” She then lists the names of twelve women whose friendships affected her sense of female identity, among them her friend of thirty years, Dolly McPherson; Ghanaian folklorist Efuah Sutherland; and novelists Rosa Guy, Paule Marshall, and Louise Merriwether.

Asked whether
The Heart of a Woman
is the book in which she started to become strongly identified as a woman writer rather than as someone whose connections are with male writers like Shakespeare or Poe, Angelou responded with a chuckle, “That's possible.” “You can say that [in your book]. You can say anything you want,” she said, again with a chuckle, displaying her wit and her strength of character (“Icon” 1997).

In Harlem, Brooklyn, and Manhattan, Angelou took advantage of opportunities for artistic improvement. Besides her apprenticeship with the Harlem Writers Guild, she joined other African American organizations that sought the words and methods for creating a responsive, black-identified community. Like her work with the Writers Guild, Angelou's work in theater increased her potential for knowledge and friendship. She had good feelings from singing solo at Harlem's famous Apollo Theater and in other arenas attracting mainly black audiences. Her powerful renditions of Calypso music overjoyed many of her listeners for whom Calypso and other types of folk songs were a neglected West Indian art form.

She was also successful in front of mixed or mainly white audiences, especially in her off-Broadway performance as the White Queen in the 1961 production of Jean Genet's play
The Blacks
. Genet's infamous play is a vicious satire about the absurdity of white racism. In the play, the black/white roles are reversed so that the formerly oppressed blacks become the aggressors and the formerly affluent whites become their pawns. Angelou loved playing the leading role, even though the idea of reversal of power did not appeal to her sense of democracy. She was particularly fond of one of the actors in the cast, Godfrey Cambridge, who in 1970, the year
Caged Bird
was published, performed his memorable role as
Watermelon Man
, directed by Melvin Van Peebles. Like
The Blacks
,
The Watermelon Man
is a drama based on role reversal.

A far more public person than she was in the earlier volumes, Angelou began to identify in the late 1950s with the civil rights movement. Eventually she became Northern Coordinator of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). She was also committed to a women's organization, the Cultural Association for Women of African Heritage (CAWAH). Angelou and Godfrey Cambridge, convinced by the ideas of Martin Luther King Jr., collaborated on a fund-raising project at the Village Gate, a popular nightclub in Greenwich Village, to benefit the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Called Cabaret for Freedom, the fund-raiser was created, directed, and performed by Angelou and Cambridge, with help from comics, dancers, and other theater people. Yet despite the cabaret project and a developing personal friendship, Angelou and Cambridge never became lovers. Between them, Angelou says, they “ignited no passionate fires” (
Heart of a Woman
, 53).

Soon after meeting South African hero Vusumzi Make in 1961, Angelou and the women of CAWAH almost halted the operations of the UN General Assembly when they conducted a sit-in at the United Nations Building after the prime Minister of Zaire, Patrice Lumumba, was assassinated in 1961.
To assist their cause, Angelou and her friend Rosa Guy sought the support of Black Muslim leader Malcolm X. She and Rosa hoped that he and his organization would affirm the actions of CAWAH and make use of the energy incited by the protest gathering. To the contrary, Malcolm X disapproved of the protest strategy: “Muslims do not demonstrate,” he responded (168). Although he predicted that conservative African American leaders, wanting to be loved by the white man, would quickly turn against the organizers, he did not offer to tell the press that the protest meant that black people were angry. Angelou, although she was disappointed with Malcolm X's response, was nonetheless entranced by his good looks and by his fire, traits that had also attracted her to South African rebel Vusumzi Make.

Angelou's engagements with writing and with politics had a significant effect on what she chose to reveal about herself in
The Heart of a Woman
. But there is a second major change in her character and in the outcome of her journey when she meets Vusumzi Make, a freedom fighter recently released from a South African prison. They met at a party given by John Killens and his wife to protest apartheid in South Africa, the systematic and total segregation of South African people into two groups: the privileged whites and the disenfranchised blacks. In her book of reflective essays,
Even the Stars Look Lonesome
(1997), Angelou describes Vus Make as one of the most brilliant people she had ever met.

A handsome, dazzling intellectual, Vusumzi Make appears to be the perfect choice for a husband, given Maya's desire to be loved and her growing concern for African liberation movements. Angelou is already engaged to a bailbondsman, Thomas Allen, a smooth man of “reddish-tan color” who gives her “lavish satisfaction” (100). But Vus is electrifying, exciting, beautiful; if she marries Thomas, she tells herself, she would always regret her decision. Vus and Maya go through the motions of marrying in England. Vus suggests as a formality that in America they claim to have married in England, while in London they say their marriage took place in New York: “We never mentioned the word marriage again” (133).

In London the couple soon begins to spend less time together. Through her husband, Maya starts to associate with a community of middle-class African women who warn her that marriage to an African freedom fighter can often lead to desertion. As Maya listens to her sisters' stories about their struggles under colonialism, she enthralls them with heroic tales about African American women. With great pride Angelou tells of Harriet Tubman, who, though free, returned to the South to bring slaves out of bondage, and of Sojourner Truth, who had the courage to speak for the rights of enslaved blacks even though white leaders denied that she was a woman and a human being.

As Vus continues to neglect her, Angelou again proves herself vulnerable to male authority, as she was with Curly, L. D. Tolbrook, Tosh Angelos, and other men in her past. In her role as Vus's wife, she is confronted for the second time with the struggle between being a homemaker and being a professional, as she had struggled in earlier autobiographies between being a mother and being a professional. As an African who had been trained only to see women as subservient, Vus Make is culturally insensitive to Angelou's needs as a working woman.

In one hilarious sequence that occurs before they are a couple, Angelou accompanies Vus to a cocktail party in the Manhattan suite of a West African ambassador. Although she is wearing her most flattering dress and can speak fluently about international politics in several languages, the guests ignore her because she is an American woman. Maya's way out of this embarrassment is to sit in the kitchen drinking gin with the black female cook. When Vus discovers her, he is humiliated and furious: “No African lady would bring such disgrace on her husband” (203). He chases the now-drunken Maya around the lobby of the classy building where she eludes him, grabs a cab out from under the nose of a waiting woman, and spends the night with her friend, Rosa Guy.

If Vus could be so uncompromising in New York, readers can imagine his attitude when they move to Cairo. He expects Angelou to honor the Egyptian custom of the husband providing for the wife. Nonetheless, Angelou accepts a position as associate editor with the
Arab Observer
without getting Vus's permission. In a torrent of fury, he reproaches her, suggesting that she is a man. All is chaos until a mutual friend and American journalist, David DuBois, persuades Vus that her salary will help them serve the revolutionary cause.

Nor is the conflict between wife and freedom worker the only trouble in the union. Years later, Angelou confided that her formerly passionate lover had a “startling intellect and an impressive accumulation of information, but was shy a mile from romance” (
Stars
55). She begins to realize—as she knew very well from his behavior while they were in America—that Vus Make is too friendly with other women and too irresponsible with money. Their irreconcilable positions toward fidelity and financial commitment require that they be examined in a palaver, an Egyptian debate conducted among peers from six countries and intended to clarify the opposing positions with regard to separation. The tribunal decides in Maya's favor but asks her to stay with Vus for six more months. She agrees, but when there is a job offer from Liberia in West Africa, she accepts it.

Angelou's disastrous relationship with Vusumzi Make evokes certain comparisons and contrasts to her marriage to Tosh Angelos in
Singin' and Swingin'
. Further retracing Angelou's steps, the first pages of
Caged Bird
recall the failed marriage between Bailey Johnson Sr. and Vivian Baxter, with its negative impact on Angelou's life as a child and a woman. In the course of her life, Angelou introduces problems or conditions that echo other volumes, giving them unity or offering points of contrast. This technique can be called connective repetition, a term Angelou seems to distrust, insisting that each book must stand alone (“Icon”1997). Yet while each book in a serial autobiography must be read independently, the reading process is greatly enriched by recognizing subtle references in and among the texts. The modifications in plot, character, and setting that are bound to occur in serial autobiographies benefit from being examined for their interrelated moments, and in Angelou's case, from the emphasis on her diverging attitudes toward her autobiographical self.

The most valuable aspect of her relationship with Vus Make is its connection to her growing romance with Africa. In the fourth and fifth volumes, Africa is the site of her growth—first in Cairo, the capital of Egypt, and then in Accra, the capital of Ghana. In these tightly interrelated volumes, Angelou initiates a search for her ancestral past. A developing writer, her continuing identification with language and character makes her sensitive to her African roots. She begins to articulate her connections to African slaves who had been “shackled with chains,” and made to carry the weight of their fears with the weight of their irons (257). Her racial consciousness becomes a major theme in the fifth volume,
All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes
in which she explores her feelings of guilt about slavery and about being homeless, neither an African nor an African American. Her search cannot culminate until the struggle of her dual ancestry is resolved.

Near the end of
The Heart of a Woman
, Maya meets her greatest challenge when Guy's car is hit by a truck outside of Accra. An old couple find him on the road and bring him to the emergency ward. At the hospital, while her son lies on a stretcher Maya contemplates his “rich golden skin” turned to “ash-grey” (263). Angelou, although she rarely repeats the same episode in detail, does so in this instance, restating many of the aspects of Guy's accident at the beginning of her next book,
All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes
.

The deliberate repetition of her terror creates both an emotional link between the two volumes and underscores the impact of Guy's injuries on both character and story line, since it is Guy's car crash that keeps Angelou in Ghana. Her retelling of the car accident, first in volume 4 and again in
volume 5, emphasizes the autobiographical experience and the use of the mother/ son theme as a transitional device. When asked about the repetition of the car crash, Angelou said she repeated the scene because she had to explain where she was and why, so that each book would be read in its own right (“Icon” 1997). In terms of dramatic effect, the startling repetition gives the volumes an intensity not achieved anywhere else in the series.

As in
Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas
, so in
The Heart of a Woman
Angelou remains in a state of flux, continuously open to changes in her life, even when those changes involve her divorce from Vus Make or her suffering over her injured son. As she faces these problems she continues the process of redefining her
self
. In
The Heart of a Woman
Angelou's more stable character derives from the self-assurance that comes from long years of living and mothering, her success with writing, and her engagement in theatre and politics. Angelou's self-assurance, hinted at in earlier volumes, is heightened in
The Heart of a Woman
, becoming a major aspect of her character.