Maya Angelou (29 page)

Sometimes the reference to a family member is barely perceptible, as in her recollection that African Americans who appear childlike might actually be acting bravely, like “humming a jazz tune while walking into a gathering of the Ku Klux Klan” (76). The tactic of humming as a way to dissipate fear is an unmistakable analogy to the scene in
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
where Mama outlasts the three “powhitetrash” children by humming a hymn (23–27). As in the four previous autobiographies, Maya's character in
Traveling Shoes
is finally tested and determined through her actual and remembered confrontations with her son Guy. She seems to vacillate between wanting to supervise him and wanting to let him go. When she learns, for instance, that Guy is having an affair with a woman a year older than herself, she is so angry that she threatens to strike him. Guy simply patronizes her, calling her his “little mother” and politely insisting on his autonomy (
Traveling Shoes
, 149).

In another painful moment Guy cooks Maya a fried chicken dinner on her return from Germany and then announces that he has made plans for the evening. Again she is “speechless,” unable to respond to Guy's words (186). Alone and unhappy, as she was at the conclusion of
The Heart of a Woman
, Angelou analyzes her feelings toward her son and questions the strength of their love for each other. So adept at expressing her sorrow over Guy's accident, she again verbalizes her pain, although in this case not in dread of her son's impending death but of his growing up, stretching beyond her ability to love or control him. This fluctuation is apparent earlier, in
Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas
, where Angelou eloquently
captures the feelings of guilt that a working mother experiences in slighting her child. Antithetically, in this fifth volume, she conveys her fear that it is the mother who will be slighted.

It is largely this ability to connect emotionally, as mother and woman, that makes Maya Angelou so popular an autobiographer. She has the ability to communicate her misfortunes and make them accessible to sensitive readers, whatever their race or gender. She has the verbal power, through her own self-portrait of a black woman, to eradicate many of the surrounding stereotypes by “demonstrating the trials, rejections, and endurances which so many Black women share” (O'Neale 1984, 26).

Through much of the fifth volume, Angelou's time-consuming concern for her son is paralleled by her efforts to form new relationships with black women. In Ghana she shares a bungalow with two roommates, Vicki Garvin and Alice Windom. Both Alice and Vicki were educated in America; Alice has a master's degree from the University of Chicago and Vicki a master's in economics along with a national reputation in labor organizing. Yet neither woman is able to get the kind of work in Ghana that reflects their capabilities. Angelou considers herself lucky to have been hired by the University of Ghana as an administrative assistant and lecturer. Although the job does not include tuition or other privileges, she confesses that she loves getting paid just to be able to look at the currency, with its portrait of a black president.

Fortunately, Angelou finds an American enclave in Ghana where she can express her shifting impressions of the country and of her place in it. Humorously dubbed the Revolutionist Returnees, the small group of African American expatriates recognizes her struggles—the conflicting feelings of being “home” yet simultaneously being “homeless,” cut off from America without tangible roots in their adopted black nation. Of her various friendships with the African Americans, she is closest to author and journalist Julian Mayfield. Like Angelou, Mayfield and his wife, Ana Livia, are identified with a movement that would enable future African Americans to live again on African soil. Sadly, Mayfield did not “come home” to Africa. He died in the United States in 1984, where he had accepted a position at Howard University, an historically black institution located in Washington, D.C., an ocean away from the promised land.

Angelou was also a friend of the revered American writer, W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963). Du Bois was one of the twentieth century's most influential theorists of black thought and philosophy. Author, critic, editor, Du Bois was best known for his book
The Souls of Black Folk
(1903), in which he described an American Negro culture rich in mythology, music, and spiritual
traditions. He was also instrumental in promoting African American writers and artists during the Harlem Renaissance in his role as editor of the journal, the
Crisis
. Unlike the Mayfields and many other expatriates, Du Bois and his second wife, Shirley Graham (1896–1977), found sanctuary in Africa when, shortly after Ghana claimed independence in 1957, President Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972) offered them permanent residency. Du Bois became a citizen of Ghana shortly before his death. “To many of us,” exclaimed Angelou, “he was the first American Negro intellectual” (
Traveling Shoes
, 124). An advocate of world peace, Du Bois joined the Communist Party in the early 1960s. With Du Bois as an accessible model, Angelou rekindled her own leadership qualities, which were at their height when she had been Northern Coordinator of Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, but which had understandably diminished following her commitment to Vus Make and her anguish over Guy's accident.

Angelou seemed resentful of Du Bois's wife, comparing her to Africa's tallest mountain, Kilimanjaro, a comparison she also used in describing Vusumzi Make's patronizing attitude toward her; Vus was “the Old Man of Kilimanjaro” and Maya a tiny shepherd (McPherson 1990, 98). The highest mountain in Africa—majestic, remote, located in Tanzania—Kilimanjaro appears to be an appropriate symbol for Maya's distaste of Shirley Graham's isolationist profile. Maya's hostility would create problems for her later in
Traveling Shoes
.

One must remember that Angelou had been absent from America during many of the formative years of the civil rights movement, when Martin Luther King and others were organizing peaceful protests and sit-ins in their efforts to integrate the schools and other public institutions. She was still in Ghana during Freedom Summer (1964), when thousands of activists organized the Mississippi Freedom Party in an attempt to register disenfranchised black voters (“Freedom Summer.” http://www). Geographically far from America and disillusioned by Dr. King's nonviolent strategies, Angelou nonetheless made a commitment to his 1963 march on Washington. In a show of support for his internationally publicized civil rights demonstration, she and a small group of African American friends—Julian Mayfield, Alice Windom, Ana Livia, and others—organized a parallel demonstration in Ghana. Noticeably shifting her perspective from “I” to “we,” Angelou outlined their plans, which included writing a letter of protest against racism and conveying it to the American ambassador. Sadly, their enthusiasm for King's historic project was dampened by King's pacifist tactics; the expatriates hated their experiences in America of being harassed by whites, then being told to be passive about it. As Angelou told Marney Rich, King's idea of “redemptive suffering”
seemed irresponsible; she had never seen a person redeemed through anguish (1989, 127). Despite her own limited participation in the protest, Angelou renewed her tenuous bonds with King, a commitment that helped prepare her psychologically for her later allegiance to Malcolm X.

For the African Americans in Ghana, Dr. King's march had grievous emotional repercussions. On the night before the Ghanaian Solidarity Demonstration, as King was about to achieve his greatest public triumph, W.E.B. Du Bois, weak, ailing, and five years shy of one hundred years of age, died. When they learned of his death, the Revolutionist Returnees transformed a politically restrained rally into a wake to commemorate the spirit of a man who made immeasurable contributions to African American life and letters. One participant started to sing “Oh, oh, Freedom” and was joined by the diverse crowd, which included farmers, vacationers, teachers, students, even Guy, who had training in protest marches. Angelou writes about this ceremony using the collective form: “We were singing Dr. Du Bois' spirit, for the invaluable contributions he made, for his shining intellect and his courage” (124). This great American editor and statesman had become a symbol to African Americans living in Ghana, for he had been welcomed to the promised land, in life and in death.

The tone of the march suddenly shifted, however, from a tribute to Du Bois to an unfounded sunrise tirade against two soldiers, one of them black, who were raising the flag at the American embassy. The sequence concludes with Angelou's invective against the government of the United States for its centuries of exploitation of black people. At the same time that she chastises the United States, she still longs for full citizenship, which she cannot expect to acquire in Africa, where the African American community often felt unwelcome.

Angelou and her small group of African American colleagues were the people most involved in the planning for Malcolm X's visit to Ghana in 1964. They helped arrange his itinerary and they introduced him to African leaders. When Angelou first met Malcolm X, he had espoused the teachings of Muslim leader Elijah Muhammad, the prophet who claimed that white people were devils. In
The Heart of a Woman
, she vividly depicts Malcolm's initial impact on her: “I had never been so affected by a human presence” (167). In 1964, en route from a pilgrimage to the holy Islamic city of Mecca, the black Muslim leader experienced a political transformation. Although he still believed that America was a racist country, he no longer held the conviction that whites were inherently evil.

For Malcolm X, the return visit from Mecca to Cairo to Ghana was intended to garner support from black world leaders for his Organization
of African Unity, a nationalist group not directly governed by the Nation of Islam. He also wished to contest racist tactics within the diaspora—those areas occupied by displaced peoples of African descent. In a complicated sequence in
All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes
, Angelou cites several references to the slave trade from Malcolm X's speeches in Ghana. If racism in America ceased, he argued, then the civil rights movement would be as unnecessary as the public sale of slaves once was. Malcolm X stressed the unity of all black people, encouraging Angelou to come home and organize his political alliance, as she had once coordinated Martin Luther King's.

His congenial manner dwindled, though, when Angelou, as she drove him to the airport, made some injudicious remarks about middle-class black organizations like the Urban League and the NAACP. He further admonished her criticism of Shirley Graham, Du Bois's mourning widow, for failing to relate to the African American protest movement. Once again Angelou expressed bitterness at Shirley Graham's prestige among the Ghanaians, having earlier compared her to Kilimanjaro. Malcolm X bluntly labeled her comments “very childish, dangerously immature” (144). Stung by his scolding, she was in tears. After his departure from Ghana, she avoided any personal analysis of Malcolm X's chastisement, using the collective rather than the singular pronoun to describe the sadly altered state of the so-called Revolutionist Returnees. Malcolm's parting reduced them to “a little group of Black folks, looking for a home” (146).

Angelou drew on vivid episodes like the visit of Malcolm X to create dynamic characters. These confrontations, interspersed within her own larger narrative of self-development, read like short stories or vignettes. Most of them are focused not on renowned world leaders but on the natives of Accra and its outskirts. Angelou's interchange with the African houseboy, Kojo, is the most delightful of these character sketches, since it entangles her once again in a reluctant maternal role. She is required to go to Kojo's school to discuss his grades with the headmaster. She, Vicki, and Alice are coaxed into supervising homework assignments in math and mapmaking. Maya is forced into a dialogue with a mere boy of fourteen, who insists on his right to debate personal issues such as whether she should or should not accept the gift of a refrigerator from her Malian suitor.

For two months Angelou assumes that the often-irritating houseboy is poor and that he is manipulating her. To her surprise, in the yard one morning she discovers a group of richly clad people who are Kojo's relatives, who have come with container upon container of vegetables to thank Maya and her roommates for helping educate him. “Auntie Maya” is so struck by the splendor of the gifting ceremony that she falls apart after the family leaves. She lies in bed drinking gin and pitying the unwanted children of Africa.

Angelou's relationships with contemporary Africans have a positive effect on her self-awareness and her personal growth. Seeing Maya's disintegration following Guy's car crash, Julian Mayfield reproaches her for becoming a wreck: “Hell, it's Guy whose neck is broken. Not yours” (10). Mayfield introduces her to a prominent African woman, folklorist Efua Sutherland (1924–1996), director of the National Theater of Ghana, a woman of compassion and sensitivity. Their friendship is spontaneous from the start. Through the solace of Brother Mayfield and Sister Sutherland, Maya is able to cry for the first time since Guy's accident. Sutherland retains a strong connection throughout the autobiography, offering advice and reinforcing Angelou's sense of belonging to the Ghanaian intellectual community. Angelou strengthens their friendship by helping design costumes and train actors at Efua's National Theatre.

A less typical friendship involves Comfort Adday, neither a colleague nor an intellectual but a stenographer/hairdresser. Comfort is lively and amusing; she loves to laugh and tease Maya about her age, her hair, her single child, and her sex life. Regrettably, Comfort starts to lose weight and strength over a period of several months. She confesses to Maya that she is the victim of a spell put on her by her lover's wife and leaves for Sierra Leone to consult a woman who will cleanse her and remove the voodoo spell. Refusing Angelou's offer of money, she requests only that her client be there when she returns. A few weeks later Maya learns that Comfort has died in Sierra Leone.