10/24/2022 0 Comments Maya angelou![]() ![]() Observes Angelou, "I don't think she ever knew that a deep-brooding love hung over everything she touched." There Angelou remained for a decade, reared by her maternal grandmother, Annie ("Momma") Henderson, who kept a country store and ruled her grandchildren with the same sense of "work, duty, religion," and morality with which she ruled her own life. When she was three and her brother Bailey was four, they were sent by their divorced parents to live in Stamps, Arkansas, which was, she said, the same as "Chitlin' Switch, Georgia Hang 'Em High, Alabama Don't Let the Sun Set on You Here, Nigger, Mississippi." "High spots in Stamps were usually negative," she observes, "droughts, floods, lynchings and deaths." Louis on 4 April 1928 to Bailey and Vivian Baxter Johnson. Marguerite Johnson (she did not become Maya Angelou until her debut as a dancer at the Purple Onion cabaret in her early twenties) was born in St. "I will say how old I am, I will say how tall I am, but I will not say how many times I have been married," she told an interviewer in 1981 "It might frighten them off."Īngelou's odyssey-psychological, spiritual, literary, as well as geographical-begins with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings , generally acceded to be the best of her four autobiographical volumes and the exclusive focus, to date, of serious critical attention. Both become articulators of the nature and validity of a collective heritage as they interpret the particulars of a culture for a wide audience of whites as well as blacks as one critic said, Angelou illuminates "with the intensity of lightning the tragedy that was once this nation's two-track culture." As people who have lived varied and vigorous lives, they embody the quintessential experiences of their race and culture.Īn account of the life and major writings of Maya Angelou is of necessity based largely on information that she herself has supplied in her autobiographies where lacunae exist, they do so because Angelou herself has chosen not to discuss certain periods of time, events, or people. As she adds successive volumes to her life story, she is performing for contemporary black American women-and men, too-many of the same functions that escaped slave Frederick Douglass performed for his nineteenth-century peers through his autobiographical writings and lectures. ![]()
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