Maya Angelou, celebrated poet and author, dies
|
| FILE
- In this March 4, 2008 file photo, American poet and noevlist Maya
Angelou smiles during an interview with The Associated Press in New
York. Angelou has died, Wake Forest University said Wednesday, May 28,
2014. She was 86. |
NEW YORK (AP)
-- Maya Angelou's story awed millions. A childhood victim of rape, she
broke through silence and shame to tell her tale in one of the most
widely read memoirs of the 20th century. A black woman born into poverty
and segregation, she recited the most popular presidential inaugural
poem in history.
"I'm not modest," she told
The Associated Press in 2013. "I have no modesty. Modesty is a learned
behavior. But I do pray for humility, because humility comes from the
inside out."
Angelou, a renaissance woman and cultural pioneer, died Wednesday at her home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She was 86.
"She
lived a life as a teacher, activist, artist and human being. She was a
warrior for equality, tolerance and peace," said her son, Guy B.
Johnson.
Tall and regal, with a deep, majestic
voice, she was unforgettable whether encountered in person, through
sound or the printed word. She was an actress, singer and dancer in the
1950s and 1960s and made a brave and sensational debut as an author in
1969 with "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," which became standard (and
occasionally censored) reading and made Angelou one of the first black
women to enjoy mainstream literary success.
"Caged
Bird" was the start of a multipart autobiography that continued through
the decades and captured a life of hopeless obscurity and triumphant,
kaleidoscopic fame.
The world was watching in
1993 when she read her cautiously hopeful "On the Pulse of Morning" at
President Bill Clinton's first inauguration. Her confident performance
openly delighted Clinton and made publishing history by making a poem a
best-seller. For President George W. Bush, she read another poem,
"Amazing Peace," at the 2005 Christmas tree lighting ceremony at the
White House. Presidents honored her in return with a National Medal of
Arts and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country's highest
civilian honor. In 2013, she received an honorary National Book Award.
She
called herself a poet, in love with the "sound of language," "the music
in language," as she explained to the AP in 2013. But she lived so many
lives. She was a wonder to Toni Morrison, who marveled at Angelou's
freedom from inhibition, her willingness to celebrate her own
achievements. She was a mentor to Oprah Winfrey, whom she befriended
when Winfrey was still a local television reporter, and often appeared
on her friend's talk show program. She mastered several languages and
published not just poetry but advice books, cookbooks and children's
stories. She wrote music, plays and screenplays, received an Emmy
nomination for her acting in "Roots," and never lost her passion for
dance, the art she considered closest to poetry.
"The
line of the dancer: If you watch (Mikhail) Baryshnikov and you see that
line, that's what the poet tries for. The poet tries for the line, the
balance," she told The Associated Press in 2008, shortly before her 80th
birthday.
Her very name was a reinvention.
Angelou was born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis and raised in Stamps,
Arkansas, and San Francisco, moving back and forth between her parents
and her grandmother. She was smart and fresh to the point of danger,
packed off by her family to California after sassing a white store clerk
in Arkansas. Other times, she didn't speak at all: At age 7, she was
raped by her mother's boyfriend and didn't talk for years. She learned
by reading, and listening.
"I loved the poetry
that was sung in the black church: `Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt's
land,'" she told the AP. "It just seemed to me the most wonderful way
of talking. And `Deep River.' Ooh! Even now it can catch me. And then I
started reading, really reading, at about 7 1/2, because a woman in my
town took me to the library, a black school library. ... And I read
every book, even if I didn't understand it."
At
age 9, she was writing poetry. By 17, she was a single mother. In her
early 20s, she danced at a strip joint, ran a brothel, got married and
then divorced. But by her mid-20s, she was performing at the Purple
Onion in San Francisco, where she shared billing with another future
star, Phyllis Diller. She also spent a few days with Billie Holiday, who
was kind enough to sing a lullaby to Angelou's son, surly enough to
heckle her off the stage and astute enough to tell her: "You're going to
be famous. But it won't be for singing."
After
renaming herself Maya Angelou for the stage ("Maya" was a childhood
nickname, "Angelou" a variation of her husband's name), she toured in
"Porgy and Bess" and Jean Genet's "The Blacks" and danced with Alvin
Ailey. She worked as a coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference and lived for years in Egypt and Ghana, where she met Nelson
Mandela, a longtime friend; and Malcolm X, to whom she remained close
until his assassination, in 1965. Three years later, she was helping
King organize the Poor People's March in Memphis, Tennessee, where the
civil rights leader was slain on Angelou's 40th birthday.
"Every
year, on that day, Coretta and I would send each other flowers,"
Angelou said of King's widow, Coretta Scott King, who died in 2006.
Angelou
was little known outside the theatrical community until "I Know Why the
Caged Bird Sings," which might not have happened if writer James
Baldwin hadn't persuaded Angelou, still grieving over King's death, to
attend a party at the home of Jules Feiffer, a cartoonist and writer.
Feiffer was so taken by Angelou that he mentioned her to Random House
editor Bob Loomis, who persuaded her to write a book by daring her into
it, saying that it was "nearly impossible to write autobiography as
literature."
"Well, maybe I will try it," Angelou responded. "I don't know how it will turn out. But I can try."
Angelou's
musical style was clear in a passage about boxing great Joe Louis'
defeat in 1936 against German fighter Max Schmeling:
"My
race groaned," she wrote. "It was our people falling. It was another
lynching, yet another Black man hanging on a tree. One more woman
ambushed and raped. A Black boy whipped and maimed. It was hounds on the
trail of a man running through slimy swamps. ... If Joe lost we were
back in slavery and beyond help."
Angelou's
memoir was occasionally attacked, for seemingly opposite reasons. In a
1999 essay in Harper's, author Francine Prose criticized "Caged Bird" as
"manipulative" melodrama. Meanwhile, Angelou's passages about her rape
and teen pregnancy have made the book a perennial on the American
Library Association's list of works that draw complaints from parents
and educators.
"`I thought that it was a mild
book. There's no profanity," Angelou told the AP. "It speaks about
surviving, and it really doesn't make ogres of many people. I was
shocked to find there were people who really wanted it banned, and I
still believe people who are against the book have never read the book."
Angelou
appeared on several TV programs, notably the groundbreaking 1977
miniseries "Roots." She was nominated for a Tony Award in 1973 for her
appearance in the play "Look Away." She directed the film "Down in the
Delta," about a drug-wrecked woman who returns to the home of her
ancestors in the Mississippi Delta. She won three Grammys for her
spoken-word albums and in 2013 received an honorary National Book Award
for her contributions to the literary community.
Back
in the 1960s, Malcolm X had written to Angelou and praised her for her
ability to communicate so directly, with her "feet firmly rooted on the
ground." In 2002, Angelou communicated in an unexpected way when she
launched a line of greeting cards with industry giant Hallmark. Angelou
admitted she was cool to the idea at first. Then she went to Loomis, her
editor at Random House, who was concerned the project would
"trivialize" Angelou, whom called "the people's poet."
"And
then I thought about it. And I thought, if I'm the people's poet, then I
ought to be in the people's hands - and I hope in their hearts. So I
thought, `Hmm, I'll do it.'"
She had been a
professor of American studies at Wake Forest University since 1982. She
was also a member of the board of trustees for Bennett College, a
private school for black women in Greensboro. Angelou hosted a weekly
satellite radio show for XM's "Oprah & Friends" channel.
She
remained so close to the Clintons that in 2008 she supported Hillary
Rodham Clinton's candidacy over the ultimately successful run of the
country's first black president, Barack Obama. But a few days before
Obama's inauguration, she was clearly overjoyed. She told the Arkansas
Democrat-Gazette she would be watching it on television "somewhere
between crying and praying and being grateful and laughing when I see
faces I know."
Active on the lecture circuit,
she gave commencement speeches and addressed academic and corporate
events across the country. Angelou received dozens of honorary degrees,
and several elementary schools were named for her.
