American cultural icon Maya Angelou dies at 86
Maya Angelou was a diva of American culture: an actress, singer, dancer and film director as well as an essayist and Pulitzer Prize-nominated poet, whose mainstream magnetism led her to write verses for Hallmark and recite one of her poems at the 1993 inauguration of President Bill Clinton.
Her most celebrated achievement, however, were the stories she told about herself in “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” (1969), the first in a series of bestselling memoirs. Universal in its themes yet compellingly particular in its details about being a black girl in a white world, it is a story of survival that exposed the ugliness as well as the beauty in a prodigiously inventive life.
A staple of high school and college reading lists, the book made Angelou a frequent target of parents and others concerned about its graphic descriptions of racism and sexual abuse. But it established her as a clear-eyed interpreter of the black experience with a message of hope and transcendence that resonated with a vast, multiracial audience.
“In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays,” she told Paris Review in 1990, “I am saying that we may encounter many defeats – maybe it’s imperative that we encounter the defeats – but we are much stronger than we appear to be, and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be.”
Angelou, who wrote more than 35 books over five decades, died Wednesday at her home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she had a lifetime appointment at Wake Forest University. Her death at 86 was announced by her son, Guy Johnson. He did not give a cause, but Angelou had a number of health problems in recent years.
Noting that she was the reason his sister was named Maya, President Barack Obama said in a statement Wednesday that Angelou filled many roles over a “remarkable” life. “But above all,” he said, “she was a storyteller – and her greatest stories were true.”
Angelou was born Marguerite Annie Johnson on April 4, 1928, in St. Louis but moved to Long Beach, California, with her parents shortly after her birth. When she was 3 and her brother, Bailey, was 4, her parents split up and her father sent them to live with his mother in Stamps, Arkansas, a “musty little town” that was so segregated, Angelou wrote, that “most Black children didn’t really, absolutely know what whites looked like.”
After four years in Stamps, Angelou and her brother returned to their mother, Vivian Baxter, in St. Louis. Angelou worshiped Baxter, a beautiful, fiercely independent woman who supported herself in nontraditional occupations, including professional gambler and merchant seaman.
“To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power,” Angelou would later write. “Or the climbing, falling colors of a rainbow.”
Baxter’s boyfriend lived with them. Angelou identified him as Mr. Freeman, a “big brown bear” who seldom spoke to the children. One Saturday when her mother was away, he raped her. Freeman was tried and convicted, but before he could serve his sentence he was found beaten to death.
His murder shocked the 8-year-old Angelou into silence. Because she had told on him and later testified at his trial, “I thought if I spoke I could kill anyone,” she said years later.
She and Bailey were sent back to their grandmother in Stamps where, for the next five years, she spoke to no one except her brother. She might have clung to muteness much longer if not for the intervention of a woman in town named Bertha Flowers, described by Angelou as “the aristocrat of Black Stamps.”
Flowers knew the silent girl read voraciously but, as she told her over tea and cookies one afternoon, words “mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with the shades of deeper meaning.”
When Flowers read aloud from “A Tale of Two Cities,” Angelou said she “heard poetry for the first time in my life.” She began to memorize and recite poems by William Shakespeare, Langston Hughes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Paul Laurence Dunbar. She wound up graduating at the top of her eighth-grade class.
After graduation, she and her brother rejoined their mother, who had moved to San Francisco. She attended George Washington High School and won a scholarship to study drama and dance at the California Labor School. To earn pocket money, she worked as a streetcar conductor and was, by her account, the first African-American woman to hold the job.
At 16, after a clumsy sexual encounter with a neighborhood boy, she became pregnant and gave birth to her son, Clyde Bailey Johnson, nicknamed Guy. She graduated from San Francisco’s Mission High School and struggled to raise her son on her own through a succession of jobs. In San Diego, she was a madam who managed a couple of prostitutes. For a period of time, she was addicted to drugs.
In 1949, she married a white ex-sailor, Tosh Angelos, but they divorced after three years. Commandingly tall at 6 feet, with a deep voice and theatrical manner, she moved to New York to study dance, then returned to San Francisco, sharing billing as a singer at the Purple Onion cabaret with comedian Phyllis Diller, who would become a close friend.
Riffing off her ex-husband’s last name and her brother’s nicknames for her, she began performing as Maya Angelou. She won a role in a touring production of “Porgy and Bess” and performed in 22 countries from 1954 to 1955.
She spent the late 1950s in New York, where she joined the Harlem Writers Guild and met novelist-playwright James Baldwin. In 1960, when she was appearing in Jean Genet’s Obie-winning play “The Blacks,” she joined the civil rights movement, co-producing a benefit cabaret for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil rights group co-founded by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. For a brief time she led the SCLC’s New York operation.
During this period she met Vusumzi Make, a South African freedom fighter, and moved with him and her son to Cairo. When her relationship with Make ended, she moved to Ghana.
She returned to the United States in 1964 to work as an organizer for Malcolm X, but he was assassinated before she could begin that work. When “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” was published in 1969, it was hailed as a new mode of autobiography, one that described the black experience “from the inside, without apology or defense,” Mary Helen Washington wrote in a study of black female autobiographers.
Her poems were notable for their jazzy rhythms and themes of struggle and transcendence, as in “Still I Rise”: “You may write me down in history/With your bitter, twisted lies,/You may trod me in the very dirt/But still, like dust, I’ll rise.”
In 2011, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Obama.
In addition to her son, Angelou is survived by two grandsons and two great-grandchildren.