by RONDA RACHA PENRICE
Dr. Maya Angelou, who kicked down the door for many African-American and other female artists, passed away Wednesday morning. She was 86.
Born Marguerite Annie Johnson on April 4, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri, but raised off and on in Stamps, Arkansas, by her paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson, as well as in various cities in the Midwest and on the West Coast, nothing in Maya Angelou’s early life or the times in which she lived hinted at the global stature she would one day attain.
A poet, memoirist, dancer, singer, actress, playwright, producer, director, teacher, civil rights activist and women’s rights advocate, there were no limits to her outlets for creative expression or her capacity to champion justice and equality. Her life was a testament to the power of possibility as well as an affirmation of courage and daring.
The journey she memorialized in her six autobiographical books, including the pivotal I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, published in 1970, by most accounts, during a time when an avalanche of previously unheard black female voices was unleashed, began when her parents divorced when she was just three. Traveling from California to Arkansas unaccompanied by an adult with her slightly older brother Bailey Johnson, Jr., the two arrived to their grandmother safely and entered into a world where “Momma,” as they called her, had the only black-owned store in the community, which served as a de facto community center.
Under Momma’s guidance and the watchful eye of her crippled son, Uncle Willie, Angelou was exposed to the best of African-American cultural traditions even against the backdrop of the horrors and limitations of the Jim Crow South. Relocation to Chicago to live with their mother Vivian Baxter was traumatic for Angelou, who was raped by Mr. Freeman, her mother’s boyfriend. Telling only Bailey, who informed the family of the violation, Angelou refused to speak for five years once Mr. Freeman was found beaten to death. Believing that her voice had resulted in his demise, she vowed not to use it again.
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In 1985, she told Essence, “The greatest gift I ever received was my son. . . .When he was four . . . I taught him to read. But then he’d ask questions and I didn’t have the answers, so I started my lifelong affair with libraries. . . .I’ve learned an awful lot because of him.”
Still life was not easy as a young, single, unwed mother. Angelou did whatever she could to survive, working multiple jobs as a cook, waitress, even briefly as a madam in a brothel, to support her son and herself. She married her first husband, Greek sailor Tosh Angelos, in 1949, but the union only lasted three years.
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via Z Communications