Maya Angelou: Adventurous Spirit

303 Pages·2021·7.81 MB·English

by  Linda Wagner-Martin

Maya Angelou
ii
Maya Angelou
Adventurous Spirit
From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970)
to Rainbow in the Cloud, The Wisdom and Spirit of
Maya Angelou (2014)
Revised and Updated Edition
Linda Wagner-Martin
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
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BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana
logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published in the United States of America 2015
This edition published 2021
Copyright © Linda Wagner-Martin, 2021
For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xi constitute
an extension of this copyright page.
Cover design by www.simonlevyassociates.co.uk
Cover image © Courtesy of the William J. Clinton Presidential Library.
Photograph by Sharon Farmer.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Wagner-Martin, Linda, author.
Title: Maya Angelou: adventurous spirit: from I know why the caged bird
sings (1970) to Rainbow in the cloud, The wisdom and spirit of Maya
Angelou (2014) / Linda Wagner-Martin.
Description: Revised and updated edition. | New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. |
Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “A wide-ranging critical
and biographical reading of Maya Angelou’s life and work, from I Know Why the
Caged Bird Sings (1970) to His Day Is Done, A Nelson Mandela Tribute (2014).
Now fully revised and updated and featuring two new chapters covering
Angelou’s final years”– Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020022540 | ISBN 9781501365584 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781501365577 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501365607 (pdf) |
ISBN 9781501365591 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Angelou, Maya. | Authors, American–20th
century–Biography. | African American authors–Biography. |
Civil rights workers–Biography. | Angelou, Maya–Criticism and interpretation.
Classification: LCC PS3551.N464 Z96 2020 | DDC 818/.5409 [B]–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022540

ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-6558-4
PB: 978-1-5013-6557-7
ePDF: 978-1-5013-6560-7
eBook: 978-1-5013-6559-1
Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India
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For Tommy, Elizabeth, and Isabelle Wagner
Farah Jasmine Griffin, Women’s Review of Books (2016), reviewing
the first edition of this book. Griffin says,
Wagner-Martin’s contextualization and explication of that first
memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, is extraordinary. By now
the book is so ubiquitous it is difficult to remember a time before
its existence. As with Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye … it became a
kind of founding text for the outpouring of work by black women
writers in the 1970s and 1980s. Like Morrison’s work, it is often
credited with breaking the silence about the intraracial sexual abuse
of black girls, while at the same time chronicling, in beautiful prose,
the inner lives of young subjects thought to have none.
Wagner-Martin recreates the sense of excitement that Caged Bird
generated, and she explains its distinctiveness. Although some readers
have placed it in the context of writings by black men such as Ralph
Ellison, James Baldwin, and Malcolm X, or of white women such as Erica
Jong or Marilyn French, Wagner-Martin suggests that Lillian Hellman’s
serial autobiographies may be better comparisons for Angelou. However,
unlike Hellman, who by the time her books were published was already
a widely regarded literary figure, Angelou was unknown…. Caged Bird
served as her calling card to a broader public. Once they discovered her,
readers felt a sense of empathy and a longing to know more.
The subject here is not Maya Angelou’s life per se, but her mind:
her ideas and how she expressed them in writing. The subject is the
oeuvre. The greatest contribution of Maya Angelou, Adventurous
Spirit is the seriousness with which it takes Angelou as a writer.
Wagner-Martin engages with a number of other analysts of African-
American women’s fiction to build the critical framework with
which she reads Angelou’s work. That a number of these scholars
are black feminist or womanist theorists creates an intellectually rich
nuanced context for her discussion. While we learn no new details of
Angelou’s life, Wagner-Martin gives us a way of reading that life. Her
final chapter focuses on Angelou as a “spirit leader,” which seems a
most apt description of the role she plays in the lives of many readers.
(excerpted with permission from Women’s Review of Books)
Contents
List of illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Preface xii
1 Marguerite Annie Johnson, April 4, 1928 1
2 Ambivalence is not so easy 17
3 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings 29
4 Gather Together in My Name 43
5 Music, poetry, and being alive 55
6 Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry
Like Christmas 65
7 The Heart of a Woman 85
8 Africa 107
9 A Song Flung Up to Heaven 121
10 Poems and the public spotlight 143
viii Contents
11 From autobiography to the essay 167
12 Maya Angelou as spirit leader 187
13 “Given to grace notes”: Words as music in Maya
Angelou’s writing 209
14 The last years 233
Bibliography 247
Index 275
Illustrations
Maya Angelou delivering the Inaugural poem
“On the Pulse of Morning” at the William Jefferson
Clinton Inauguration, January 1993. xvi
Maya Angelou receiving an honorary doctor of letters
degree from Northeastern University. 41
Maya Angelou as a scholar and fellow at Bellagio Study Center,
Bellagio, Italy, probably around 1974. 75
Maya with sister writers Rosa Guy and Louise Merriwether
on one of their sojourns together in North Carolina. 87
Rita Dove, Toni Morrison, and Maya Angelou at the latter’s
party celebrating Toni Morrison’s being awarded the
Nobel Prize for Literature, Winter, 1994. 105
Holograph sheet of Maya Angelou’s handwriting from
A Song Flung Up to Heaven. 122
Coretta Scott King and Maya Angelou. 137
Maya Angelou with Amina Baraka at the side,
Val Gray Ward, and the writers Sonia Sanchez and
Mari Evans at her home in Atlanta, Georgia. 147