Maya Angelou (27 page)

Johnson's “The Heart of a Woman” is an eight-line lyric poem in which a woman's heart is compared to a caged bird crashing against its bars. Johnson's use of the symbol of the bird, however, is quite different from Dunbar's, for her bird is a caged woman whose isolation seems to suggest sexual as well as racial confinement. Like a bird, the heart of a woman flies away from home during the day, returning at night to its cage.

Because both Georgia Douglas Johnson and Maya Angelou deal with the theme of isolation and because both use the metaphor of the caged bird in their writings, it is tempting to view Angelou's allusion to Johnson's trapped bird as a negative reference to Maya's character in
The Heart of a Woman
. James Robert Saunders (1991), for example, states that the “alien cage” of Johnson's poem represents Angelou's return to a place of torment following her failed marriage to Vus Make. It seems that Angelou, with her awareness of black history and literature, would have regarded Johnson's lonely bird in flight as only a stage in a woman's life cycle and in her history. The Johnson poem was written two years before the passing of the Nineteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution (August 26, 1920), which finally granted women the right to vote. Angelou, while facing barriers of race and gender, has flown beyond them, thanks to the very protest movements described in the fourth autobiography. The broken creature of Johnson's 1918 poem is an image from the past, too forlorn to symbolize Angelou's failed marriage. Although she may indeed sympathize with the sad prisoner of Johnson's lyric, the Maya Angelou of
The Heart of a Woman
is too strong and too self-determined to be kept in a cage.

The fourth autobiography also contains other literary allusions. The opening reference to Jack Kerouac's
On the Road
connects Angelou's theme of the journey to Kerouac's restlessness. Angelou makes reference to the black folk figure, Brer Rabbit, in a story she recalls to herself in Cairo as she gathers courage for her new job on the
Arab Observer
. Her use of Brer Rabbit connects her to the oral traditions of Africa and America. But it is in the allusion to Johnson's title, to the repeated “WOMAN” of both poem and autobiography, where one discovers a more woman-centered Maya Angelou—more centered in her literary ambitions, more centered in her racial identity.

Psychological criticism is the application of the beliefs of Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank, Karen Horney, and other psychological theorists to works of literature, in the hopes of getting closer to their meaning. In a standard psychological reading of
The Heart of a Woman
, theorists begin by investigating Guy's relationship to his mother or to a mother substitute. A number of incidents reveal Guy's sexual desire for women his mother's age or older, the most prominent of whom is Billie Holiday. The great blues singer, who seems to disgust Guy, also arouses him. During her visit, Holiday sings intimately to Guy each night, giving Maya the impression that Holiday was
“starved for sex and only the boy, looking at her out of bored young eyes, could give her satisfaction” (13).

A Freudian analyst would argue that in order to free himself from his Oedipus complex—the desire to dispose of the father and have sex with the mother—Guy needed to deflect Holiday's affections away from himself and his mother, just as he needed to discourage Maya's affair with Vus Make. Not until Guy experienced and recovered from his car accident could he begin to sever himself from his desirable mother, who, according to his friends, had “a prettier shape than Marilyn Monroe” (130). Some far-fetched analyst might even suggest that the accident was “intentional,” that Guy desired it so he could be saved from his sexual desires for his mother.

In a psychological/feminist reading, it is not the boy's or the man's perspective that one starts with but the woman's. Many feminists find the “Oedipus complex,” the so-called cornerstone of Freudian thinking, to be utterly wrong-headed, since the theory assumes that the mother is of no consequence and that she is subordinate to the father or the father substitute (Stanton in Wright 1992, 296). In the 1970s a number of feminist analysts, including Nancy Chodorov, Carol Gilligan, and Jean Baker Miller, challenged this male way of thinking. In their revision of psychological theory they proposed a woman-oriented perspective, focusing on the ideas that the mother is central to human development; that mother/daughter relationships are at the core of development; and that female friendships can be extensions of the mother/daughter dynamic to the extent that they are nurturing, supportive, and maternal.

The Heart of a Woman
offers a wealth of woman-centered insights. As a woman who loves men, Angelou is very open about her sexual feelings, making almost no effort to conceal her inclinations. She craves sex, but she likes being satisfied. She is neither passive nor timid in approaching men. She is in her words a “healthy woman with a healthy appetite” (101).

Angelou also appears to be a woman who is enticed by women, although she tends to deny this possibility, both in the autobiographies and in interviews. In the crucial Billie Holiday sequence in
The Heart of a Woman
, Maya protests against the possibility of Holiday's lesbianism, working out a careful negative response so that if Billie wants to go to bed with her, Maya can say no without hurting her feelings. A psychological feminist would help Angelou deal with her conflicting attitudes toward lesbianism, suggesting a greater openness toward the likelihood that she consciously or unconsciously desires women more than she is willing to admit.

Moving to safer but surely related grounds, it was in the 1970s that psychological feminists began to suggest that lesbianism was most likely
connected to the relationship between mother and daughter. The positive treatment of the mother/daughter relationship was another area of analysis that had been almost completely overlooked until the coming of the New Women's Movement. Looking to her childhood, it is likely that Angelou's complex range of feelings toward women was based on the absence of her mother at the age of three, the age that so-called Oedipal feelings are considered to be most critical. When at age eight Maya is again reunited with Vivian Baxter, she is raped by her mother's boyfriend, a rather obvious father figure. Unable to deal with the sexual life of her daughter, Vivian sends her back to her grandmother, not becoming close to Maya until the child/woman is sixteen. All of these circumstances generate conflicting attitudes toward being a woman.

In
The Heart of a Woman
the most passionate parts of the book have to do with Billie Holiday and Vivian Baxter. These relationships, as well as a number of others involving both men and women, depend on Maya's early experiences with her mother, which include abandonment; feelings of rejection; feelings of being ugly when compared to the beautiful Vivian; exposure to a rapist. Each of these areas is open to feminist discourse. A committed and knowledgeable psychological feminist reading could continue to expand on Angelou's feelings about being a woman, analyzing them in
The Heart of a Woman
and in the entire autobiographical series.

Chapter 7

The fifth volume of Maya Angelou's autobiography,
All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes
, tells the story of Angelou's four-year residency in Ghana from 1963 to 1966. When the narrative was published twenty years later, it was greeted with praise and disappointment. Eugenia Collier, on the one hand, proclaimed the book to be “the apex toward which the other autobiographies have pointed” (1986, 24), while Russell Harris, in an interview in
Zelo
, claimed that the book was too “pedantic,” too academic. Except for the quest idea, there was not much of a story line. Angelou replied: “I think you might need another reading, because there are other stories in the book” (1989, 168).

One major story found in
Traveling Shoes
, one that most critics overlook, is Angelou's unconditional love for her son. The volume begins with a reiteration of Guy's car accident, the episode that concluded
The Heart of a Woman
. In
Traveling Shoes
Guy recovers from his injuries and continues to mature. A student at the University of Ghana, he seeks independence from his mother as he attempts to define his own separate goals.

Another major story is Angelou's investigation of her African and African American identities. She explores this conflict as it exists for the American expatriates living in Accra as well as for the groups of people—Bambara, Keta, Ahanta—who still observe the traditions of their ancestors. At the end of
Traveling Shoes
these issues are seemingly resolved when Angelou decides to return to the ways and culture of the United States. Surrounded by friends at the Accra airport, she leaves Guy in Africa to finish his education.
At the same time she forsakes her newly embraced alliance with Mother Africa, claiming she is “not sad” to be leaving Ghana (209).

The narrative point of view in
All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes
is again sustained through the first-person autobiographer in motion. She moves from journey to journey, propelling the story from one place to another. It is not accidental that the word
traveling
appears in the title. The autobiography begins with Maya's and Guy's travel to Ghana and ends with her anticipated departure to America in the concluding lines of the autobiography. Told from the first-person point of view, the fifth volume, like the others, is subjective. Owing perhaps to the dominance of the travel motif, it is at the same time more tightly controlled.

In
All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes
, the African narrative is interrupted by a journey within a journey. Angelou accepts the offer to join a theatrical company in a revival of French writer Jean Genet's play
The Blacks
. Three years earlier
The Blacks
shocked its off-Broadway audiences with the force of its racial commentary. In that performance, described in
The Heart of a Woman
, Angelou triumphed in the sinister role of the White Queen. Now the play was being revived, and Angelou was asked to repeat the role on a limited tour, with performances in Berlin and Venice. The consequences of the Berlin journey are analyzed later in this chapter, in the sections on setting and character. In terms of point of view, the German sequence offers a glimpse of Angelou as traveler in an alien land with a history of racial prejudice quite different from what she experienced in America.

As in all her volumes, the title contributes to the plot and to the thematic impact. Angelou states that the title of the fifth volume comes from a spiritual about walking in heaven: “I've got shoes / you got shoes / All of God's children got shoes” (“Icon” 1997). The traveling shoes that belong to the narrator and to all children of African descent restate the journey motif. As she told George Plimpton, the book is about “trying to get home,” which for Jews would mean Israel and for black Americans would mean Africa (1990, rpt. 1994, 20).

On a much lighter note, the traveling shoes might also refer to the pair of feet made famous by writer Langston Hughes in his
Best of Simple
: “These feet have walked ten thousand miles working for white folks and another ten thousand keeping up with colored” (1989, 100). In his amusing way, in this story about Simple's weary feet, Hughes suggests the long stretch of unwanted travel taken by African Americans in the last century of so-called freedom. Angelou speaks passionately of Hughes in
Caged Bird
as an
example of the “wit and humor” that he shares with Dorothy Parker and Edna St. Vincent Millay (and with Angelou herself) (“Icon” 1997).

Setting or place, always an important element in Angelou's writing, assumes perhaps its greatest prominence in the fifth volume. Most of the action is set in Accra, the capital of the West African nation of Ghana. The minute details of contemporary African life, contrasted against ancient customs, lend the volume an exotic backdrop from which to view personal events like Guy's recovery from the car crash or Maya's feelings of dislocation. The African setting plays an important, almost inseparable part in her character development.