She bid us welcome,
stay awhile. Showed us ’round
then said, Go on, chile.
Maya Angelou was easily, almost too easily, so much more than your usual triple threat. The singer, dancer, actress was also a rape-incest survivor, a madam at one stage, mother, university professor, Oprah’s good friend and, of course, international best-selling poet, essayist and inspirational writer.
She was also a gateway, a fierce but friendly portal to a universe of African-American literature, and a signpost marked Permission for a generation of young poets (among others) trying out their wings, myself included. By extensions I only half comprehend, she also opened up a parallel universe of Caribbean and other black literature to my hungry, then twenty-something writer’s soul.
Maya Angelou, multiple threat, was once upon a time my way home.
She was not the only path or portal. James Baldwin, Langston Hughes and, yes, even the curmudgeonly V.S. Naipaul all represent gateways to the literature for me, and acted as travel guides and companions across vast and varying landscapes. My relationship with Maya was different, is different, however.
The others, once they fulfilled their gateway functions, remained companions on the journey. Maya did not.
I admit this with a degree of shame-face and questioning. Was it that her work, to my mind, ears and spirit, fell off after a while somewhere into that gap of mainstream, populist, motivational/inspirational musings? Or did I simply outgrow her once I felt, as reader and budding writer, that I knew the route, could find my way home again and again, whenever I needed after she got me there the first time. Was she like the travel map, foreign phrase book or GPS you ditch once you feel comfortable with the terrain? I like to imagine she’s the one who gave me permission to do that, too, and let go my hand when the time came.
On the Underground,
Londoner reads, laughs out loud,
that much less lonely.
I remember reading I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first instalment in Maya’s five-part autobiography, and feeling moved beyond words. But it is the subsequent volumes, Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas, All God’s Children Need Travelling Shoes and other similarly animated-sounding titles from the collection, that had me transported even as I was glued to the pages, and laughing loudly on London public transport.
The year was 1986/87. I was working for the Weekly Jamaica Gleaner (UK) in Brixton, South West London; sharing a flat with my paternal grandfather in Stockwell, one tube stop away on the Victoria line or as many as five stops away on the Northern line, both of us revelling in our space—for that capital city was a playground of sorts—but not immune to sudden and extended periods of what I call Lonely Londonitis. I was going through my first Sam Selvon stage, but also reading copious amounts of Maya and Alice Walker, the former having led me to the latter.
On the way to work or home, especially on criminally cold days, Maya would keep me company on the tube or bus journey—both of which seemed interminable and miserable despite the relatively short distance. The other passengers glanced at me, suspect, as I cackled aloud at some exploit of Maya’s as a stripper or on tour, as behind the Iron Curtain. I did not care about those glances as I exited trains and buses, made my way along platforms, up from the bowels of the city to emerge onto slush-filled, dogshit-littered streets.
When I finished Maya’s autobiography I became hooked on her poetry, which was addictive, evocative and memorable. We can all recite a few lines from “Phenomenal Woman” or “Still I Rise.” I admired her substance, which was often difficult and gritty—and loved her style; the ease, the approachable, every-black-girl-womaness of it; the fun, sassy sexiness. (Who can forget the image of a woman provoking the envy of others because she dances as if she has diamonds at the meeting of her thighs?)
I spent all my money on her books.
Most of all, as I began, cautiously, to write, scratching at the surfaces of what it might mean to create poetry, I found myself daring to imagine: I could do this! I can write something approaching this.
But this is not where Maya and I parted company. Fast-forward about four years to find me seated in front an interview panel of tutors and professors at Warwick University. I was engaged in Comparative American Studies (a lively, multi-discipline degree embracing North American, Latin American & Caribbean literature, history and culture—plus Spanish), and I was one of six students up for selection for an exchange year in the United States.
North into cold truths—
Or deeper into sunlit states
of joy and pain?
My tutors wanted me to go to Wisconsin. I feverishly desired to go to the University of South Carolina.
Why? They pleaded. University of Wisconsin has the superior programme.
I know, I responded. But I don’t want the cold weather. It was the truth but not the real reason.
Hmmm. Then how about Miami University? Their programme is good also.
I sighed and gave them the real-real reason.
Maya Angelou lectures at Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, in neighbouring North Carolina, I told them. I know I’d get a chance to see her, to hear her.
I remember the panel exchanged looks. Then one of them raised an eyebrow and leaned forward as if about to raise stakes in a poker game, or as if to negotiate with a market vendor.
Well, you do know that Toni Morrison lectures at Wisconsin?
I was floored, weeping almost at the wonderful embarrassment of riches being spread out before me. By now, Maya had led me to Morrison, with her hot-cool, beautiful-cruel and impossible storytelling. The woman had written The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and Beloved—had produced Jazz, a novel in which the music is a main character, for God’s sake! I was torn—torn, I tell you.
(Of course, I was also salivating, along with the two other students who had put USC as their first choice, at the chance of seeing James Brown up close and personal. Seems the Godfather of Soul was nearing the end of his sentence for drug possession, and we all hoped to get there in time to glimpse him serving out the rest of his community service as a bus driver on the downtown streets of Columbia!)
It took me two weeks and an hour under the deadline to make up my mind. Looking back, I can see the tutors had a point, but, in the end, confederate sunshine won out. Well, almost.
South Carolina chose the winter I was there to snow and freeze—the first time in seventeen years, I was told.
But the remaining seasons changed as they should, and in the April of 1992, I got to see, hear and meet Dr. Angelou when she came to South Carolina for a reading at nearby Benedict College.
She left me with three lasting impressions. One, that poetry need not be “performed” in order to be powerful or to successfully engage an audience. She read from her books or from sheets on a lectern; occasionally would break into song or an improvised line or two—but she read. The second impression was her generosity. Maya presented her own work and the work of other poets, some her favourites, plus she had “back-up readers” on stage with her who delivered some of the work while she listened and looked on, Miles Davis-like from the side, but with enjoyment and appreciation evident in that dazzling, mile-wide smile of hers.
The third impression was a command from her poem “Our Grandmothers”: When you learn, teach; when you get, give.
At the end of the summer came a three-week trek of the southern United States. There were three of us: Claire, an English politics major; Monique, a film buff from the Netherlands; and me, a black-Bajan-Brit on a civil rights kick. Maya and Langston came with us. We jumped in a red rental car and journeyed west across the vast landscape we had spent the past year studying. We followed historic Route 66, went down into the Grand Canyon, criss-crossed the Mexican border spending a few days in Juarez, before retracing Kennedy’s last steps, heading back slowly via Selma, Montgomery, Birmingham, Atlanta.
Oh, we had maps and tourist brochures, money for motels, dives and the one three-star hotel, meals at Denny’s, McDonald's, truck stops, southern soul food diners, and a night out in Bourbon Street when we reached New Orleans. But Maya’s And Still I Rise and Langston’s Selected Poems were my real guides, company, adventure, sustenance and comfort—especially on the civil rights pilgrimage, or the night spent on a First Nation reservation when the stars spanning the heavens seemed within touching distance, emphasizing our oneness yet our remoteness and vulnerability right there in the middle of the Arizona desert.
Looking back, I can see that it is shortly after my college experiences that Maya and I amicably and mutually parted company. Upon return to England and after graduation, saturated with the literatures of Latin and North America, with black, white and Hispanic experience—I started to look homeward.
I replaced Maya’s autobiography and poetry on my bookshelf, added to them around the time of Clinton’s inauguration with the collections On The Pulse of Morning and A Brave and Startling Truth. But largely followed her from a distance that allowed for the increased buzz-buzzing in my head: Who and where were the storytellers to reflect my own tangled, twisting African-Caribbean sensibility and reality?
It is a question others of similar background have asked themselves. In the America segment of his seminal essay collectionA New World Order, Kittitian-British author Caryl Phillips charts his own love affair with Baldwin, Ellison, Wright, and other African-American authors. Much later, in the Caribbean chapters, he realizes:
“I could respond to the universal elements of African-American fiction, or theatre, or poetry, and I could recognize the roots of its indignation, righteous or otherwise. However, African-American writers (in spite of their chosen locales, which were recognizably urban, and their faces which were undeniably black), left me with a feeling that there was something missing…. I realized that if I was going to write, I would have to find some other literature which I could both learn and be inspired by….”
Phillips, operating in what he describes as a “world of words,” but writing from a kind of no-man’s land of transplanted Caribbean-Britishness, finally settles upon two Caribbean writers he can relate to: Selvon and George Lamming.
It was Caribbean women writers who were largely missing from my landscape and, eventually, I made room for Trinidad’s Rosa Guy, Guyana’s Grace Nichols, Dominica’s Jean Rhys, and Barbados’ own Paule Marshall. More recently Jamaica/UK’s Andrea Levy has been added to that list. There are others, although for quite a while now, I have found myself greedier than ever for answers from older and newer generations of both male and female Barbadian writers.
I thank Marguerite Johnson of St Louis, Missouri, risen April 4, 1928, and again on May 28, 2014, for being among the first to feed that hunger, for sign-posting the route, then letting me go.
Fierce, phenomenal
gentle woman, we sing you—
wing your way on home.
• This essay first appeared on the blog The Blues Differently in June 2014.
