![]() It was hounds on the trail of a man running through slimy swamps. It was another lynching, yet another Black man hanging on a tree. Feiffer was so taken by Angelou that he mentioned her to Random House editor Bob Loomis, who persuaded her to write a book.Īngelou’s musical style was clear in a passage about boxing great Joe Louis’s defeat against German fighter Max Schmeling: “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.Īngelou was little known outside the theatrical community until I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which might not have happened if James Baldwin hadn’t persuaded Angelou, still grieving over King’s death, to attend a party at Jules Feiffer’s house. Article content Stephen Jaffe/AFP/Getty Images Steve Exum/Getty Images ![]() This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. ![]() Three years later, she was helping King organize the Poor People’s March in Memphis, Tenn., where the civil rights leader was slain on Angelou’s 40th birthday. She worked as a co-ordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Council, and lived for years in Egypt and Ghana, where she met Malcolm X and remained close to him until his assassination, in 1965. But it won’t be for singing.”Īfter renaming herself Maya Angelou for the stage (“Maya” was a childhood nickname), she toured in Porgy and Bess and Jean Genet’s The Blacks and danced with Alvin Ailey. She spent a few days with Billie Holiday, who was kind enough to sing a lullaby to Angelou’s son Guy, surly enough to heckle her off the stage and astute enough to tell her: “You’re going to be famous. By her mid-twenties, she was performing at the Purple Onion in San Francisco, where she shared billing with another future star, Phyllis Diller. In her early twentes, she danced at a strip joint, ran a brothel, was married (to Enistasious Tosh Angelos, her first of three husbands) and then divorced. … And I read every book, even if I didn’t understand it.”Īt age nine, she was writing poetry. And then I started reading, really reading, at about seven-and-a-half, because a woman in my town took me to the library, a black school library. “It just seemed to me the most wonderful way of talking. “I loved the poetry that was sung in the black church: ’Go down Moses, way down in Egypt’s land,”’ she told the AP. Other times, she didn’t speak at all: At age 7, she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend and didn’t speak for years. 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. Louis and raised in Stamps, Ark., and San Francisco, moving back and forth between her parents and her grandmother. Angelou was born Marguerite Johnson in St. Her very name as an adult was a reinvention. The poet tries for the line, the balance,” she told The Associated Press in 2008, shortly before her birthday. “The line of the dancer: If you watch (Mikhail) Baryshnikov and you see that line, that’s what the poet tries for. 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. ![]() She mastered several languages and published not just poetry, but advice books, cookbooks and children’s stories. 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. Article content Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty Images Chuck Burton/The Associated Press 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.” But a few days before Obama’s inauguration, she was clearly overjoyed. She remained close enough 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. Bush, she read another poem, Amazing Peace, at the 2005 Christmas tree lighting ceremony at the White House. Her confident performance openly delighted Clinton and made the poem a bestseller, if not a critical favourite. In 1993, she was a sensation reading her cautiously hopeful On the Pulse of the Morning at former President Bill Clinton’s first inauguration. An actress, singer and dancer in the 1950s and 1960s, she broke through as an author in 1970 with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which became standard (and occasionally censored) reading, and was the first of a multipart autobiography that continued through the decades. ![]()
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