Maya Angelou (28 page)

Additionally, in presenting the African setting as a major component of the fifth autobiography, Angelou, like other writers before her, describes to an American readership her impressions of what white explorers once called the Dark Continent,
dark
suggesting to them Africa's quality of mystery as well as the dark complexion of most of her people. In the first sentence of
Traveling Shoes
she describes the secret night breezes and how they vanish into the “utter blackness.” Angelou is often intrigued by blackness, and in one of the most passionate moments of a February 1996, interview on television, she begins to praise the dark skin of Mrs. Flowers, her mentor in
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
, simultaneously stroking her own face in recognition of black pride. As described in
Traveling Shoes
, the dark skin colors of the Ghanaians remind her of peanut butter, caramel, and other treats from childhood. She admires Sheikhali, her suitor from Mali, for the purple hues of his skin; her beautician, Comfort Adday, for being the color of “ancient bricks” (37); and her roommate Alice Windom for her “dark, mahogany color” (30). The interaction of skin tones with clothing and landscape contributes significantly to the unfolding of character and setting.

Further settings on the periphery of the African locale are Berlin and Venice, the two cities she visits as the White Queen in the revival of
The Blacks
. Although Angelou's inclusion of the Berlin-Venice tour might be viewed as a digression that detracts from the African-based setting, the theater sequence helps contribute to her character development and, through use of contrast, to the profound exploration of her feelings for a homeland. The Berlin setting offers Angelou an unusual perspective. She is remote enough from Africa to gain new insights into the behavior of black Americans and the nature of white racism, both reflected against the German terrain. She gains a new respect for African Americans, missing them now because they seem more spirited than the Africans she has encountered in Ghana. These interruptions in the
Ghanaian setting are effective in giving
Traveling Shoes
a universal quality as the autobiographer reaches beyond her private life into a conflicting world.

In terms of plot development,
Traveling Shoes
is consistent with the earlier volumes. Each is designed to be a continuing journey of the self. The plot of
Traveling Shoes
begins in Ghana and terminates with Angelou's decision to return to America. She decides to leave for conscious reasons involving her heritage, her craft, and her private life, especially as it relates to her son.

Angelou's autobiographies receive their shape from personal and cultural referents rather than from the necessities of plot, as in mystery novels or spy fiction. Whereas a novel is a kind of narrative that must be concluded, an autobiography is an unfinished narrative, told in the first person by the adult who recollects it years later.
All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes
cannot conclude the series because there is yet another autobiography to be written, from images and actions that remain in the repository of memories that connect her to the people around her.

Soon after volume 5 opens, the narrator, now thirty-three, relates the horrifying event of Guy's car accident that results in a broken arm, leg, and neck. When asked why she repeated the accident scene, which also ends
The Heart of a Woman
, Angelou gave two reasons: first, each book must stand alone; and, second, it was necessary that she explain who she was and what she was doing in Africa (“Icon” 1997).

In order to infuse the African setting with a credible plot, Angelou needed to detail the causes for her lengthy stay. She intensifies the early pages by dramatizing her long wait for medical reports from a hospital totally foreign to her. Many parents' greatest fear is the death of a child; this is the most unspeakable of all catastrophes. Angelou universalizes this fear in
Traveling Shoes
, taking readers close to death but then reversing the expectation. Readers raised on popular melodrama expect Guy to die and Angelou to fall apart. But true to her point of view, Angelou elucidates the slow pain of Guy's recovery. There is no catastrophe. As time passes, he gradually moves out of danger and regains his strength. Simultaneously, Maya demonstrates her increased maturity. Like most people whose children grow up, she starts to appreciate her freedom now that the burdens and responsibilities of motherhood are lessened. Aware that she must respect Guy's choices, she consciously ceases to make him the center of her activities. She forms new friendships—with her roommates, with African poets and political leaders, with African American writers and artists living in Ghana.

At the same time, Angelou strengthens her ties with Mother Africa. In traveling through eastern Ghana, she forms allegiances with people she meets and also becomes spiritually attached to her venerated ancestors. These intimate racial, political, and sacred connections with Africans allow Angelou to recognize but not to resolve the dual nature of her heritage. By the end of
Traveling Shoes
she has explored her roots, has come to terms with much of her past, and has decided to return to America to begin a new phase of her life, one that assimilates the African and American elements of her character: “I think in
All God's Children
I have written about some of the complexity of returning, at one, and being unable to return [to Africa] and yet being so grateful that I had made the attempt” (“Icon” 1997).

The mother/son plot, like the African/African American plot, is dual in nature. To develop the plot is to create a series of active/counteractive rhythms. The confrontations between love and desertion, between knowledge and misunderstanding, are two examples of the shifting stories that shape the series.

For Angelou, though, the termination of plot seems less successful here than in her other volumes, possibly because she forces her narrator/self to present too sharp a separation between herself and Africa. Four years earlier, African American novelist Alice Walker attempted in
The Color Purple
(1982) to unify similar geographical (Africa/America) and familial (Sister Celie/Sister Nettie) themes. At the end of the novel, Nettie arrives from Africa with her husband, Samuel, their two children, Olivia and Adam, and a young African woman, Tashi, who is Adam's wife. Everyone has come, united at last in one colossal family reunion. But Walker's finale is too perfect, too out of place in a novel that so consistently raised the troubling questions of race and gender in America. Director Steven Spielberg, in his 1985 film version of
The Color Purple
, ignored many of the book's socioeconomic issues but retained Walker's joyous resolution, visually amplified through the use of dazzling African costumes and children's clapping games.

Like Walker, Maya Angelou attempts to tie together the divergent strands that inform the fifth autobiography. Thus, the final scene at the Accra airport is crowded with a farewell contingent of sages, poets, expatriates, dancers, dignitaries, college students, professors, and children. But as John C. Gruesser points out, the end of Angelou's journey is not convincing. The conflicts inherent in the book remain unresolved and the ending is “too easily manufactured at the last minute to resolve the problem of the book” (1990, 18). Similarly, Deborah E. McDowell (1986) finds the resolution of the plot to be stereotyped and unconvincing.

As Angelou admits, her view of Africa is not completely authentic. At times she romanticizes her experiences: “But whether I like it or not, I am
also captured by the romance of history” (“Icon” 1997). In
Even the Stars Look Lonesome
, she describes the illusion called Africa: “Despite a spate of nature commentaries, and despite endless shelves of travel books, Africa remains for most of us a hazy and remote illusion” (65).

In Ghana, Angelou was to some degree, and quite reasonably so, caught up in a vision of Africa similar to what a generation of black Americans experienced at home in the 1960s: identification with the Pan-African Movement and with West African hair styles, clothing, language, music, and other manifestations of African culture. In
Traveling Shoes
she embraced these styles, hair and dress in particular. In one revealing episode, Angelou is at first horrified when her beautician, Comfort Adday, styles her hair into ugly strands like the “pickaninnies” in old photos (37). Comfort, apparently amused, goes on to reshape, tighten, and cut Angelou's hair so that by the end of the session her customer looks just like a Ghanaian. Angelou self-consciously recalls this moment, knowing that to “look like” a Ghanaian meant only a cosmetic transformation and not a genuine assimilation into West African attitudes and traditions. It seems that here and in other episodes of
Traveling Shoes
, the contradictions of race, culture, and nationality are too strong to disappear and too fragile to preserve.

The ambivalent conclusion of
Traveling Shoes
involves Angelou's departure not only from Ghana but from Guy as well. Her journey in Africa over, she waits at the Accra airport for the plane to return her to America. Using the phrase “second leave-taking” (209), she suggests that her awaited voyage from Africa to America is an ironic echo of the voyage long ago, when West African slaves were chained and wrenched from their homeland and families. She parallels her departure from Africa with her departure from Guy, the emotional center of her autobiographies, the son who in
Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas
she had left in America with his grandmother so that she could tour Europe with
Porgy and Bess
. In
Traveling Shoes
, though, she leaves Guy in Africa as she prepares to return to America.

The reversals at the end of
Traveling Shoes
suggest the apparent end of Angelou's mother/son plot. Guy stands apart from her, surrounded by his African friends. In this, her last depiction of Guy in the fifth autobiography, Angelou roots him in the culture of Ghana, thus returning him to the place of his ancestors. He is magically transformed from uncooperative son to newly born American African, free to continue his education at the University of Ghana while she is free to explore her potential as performer and writer.

In a metaphor that effectively captures the mother/son confrontation in this volume, Angelou compares her maternal role to an apron string, untied and in shreds. The same metaphor might apply to the plot design that ends
the autobiography. She waits until the final pages to tie the unstrung narrative threads together, offering her readers a vision of Guy as a lord, perhaps a chief. Angelou seems to create, in this departure scene, a sunny, almost regal atmosphere, as if to protect herself from acknowledging the reality of so absolute a separation. In giving her son back to Africa, to his ancestors, she appears to be constructing a perfect ending. Instead, it seems to fall short of the forthright self-assessment that readers have come to expect in her autobiographies. As in her dissolving romance with Africa, her farewell address to Guy shows that the rough ends of the narrative are still unraveled.

As Maya Angelou brings the mother/son confrontation to its paradoxical conclusion, readers observe that it is the mother who again forsakes the son, in order to rediscover the special rhythms of her African American heritage. While some critics praise Angelou for her show of independence, others question the willful cutting of the maternal ties that she had established throughout the series. When asked about this paradox, Angelou emphatically stated that “if you are really a mother you can let go. It's like love of any sort” (“Icon” 1997).

At the threshold of the New World, Maya Angelou readies herself for departure, letting readers go now that the conflicting elements of point of view and narrative structure have been settled. Ironically, though, the book ends not in departure but in stasis. Without her son, and without full acknowledgment of her Ghanaian heritage, she stands at the edge of Africa, at the Accra airport, with the journey westward anticipated but not accomplished, with the narrative actually unfinished.

Angelou's intense suffering over Guy's injury both sets the tone for this pensive fifth volume and greatly reinforces the strength of her character. She first describes herself negatively, in terms of darkness and shadows. She is a “dark spectre” who walks the sweltering white streets (4). A shadow, a ghost, Angelou is reduced to silence. Readers need to interpret the silence not only as a present response but also as a duplication of the past. For her silence is reminiscent of her muteness following the rape by Mr. Freeman described in
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
, and of her unspoken terror in
The Heart of a Woman
when friend and novelist John Killens telephones Maya in Chicago to warn her of a crisis between Guy and a Brooklyn gang.

Angelou again develops her self-portrait through a combination of present incidents and past recollections, in which events and responses are
often meant to recall earlier moments. Thus, in
Traveling Shoes
she thinks warmly of her mother, Vivian Baxter, remembering how she had instructed Maya and Bailey in the art of survival much as Maya has instructed Guy, and how Vivian was her “doting mother” (151). On her journey through rural East Ghana she remembers the compassion her grandmother, Annie Henderson, had shown to African Americans traveling during segregation, when they were denied bed, board, food, and decent toilets. When Maya and her roommates reluctantly hire a village boy named Kojo to do housework, she associates his intense color and delicate hands with her brother Bailey.

Kojo is also an obvious substitute for Guy, previously her in-house son, now grown and at university, out of his mother's reach. Maya comments on her feelings for Kojo: “[T]he old became new and I was pinched back into those familiar contractions” (57). In this passage she uses birth images—“pinched” and “contractions”—to describe the painful effect of Kojo's presence and of Guy's past on her own rebirth.