A True American Spirit of Maya Angelou - Coursework Example

Maya Angelou: A True American Spirit One of the most inspiring figures of the 20th century still makingheadlines today is the poet and historian Maya Angelou. Born a poor black woman and raised in the Jim Crow South and the product of a broken home, Angelou would eventually rise to become one of the most respected and well-loved figures of American history. She was even invited to recite one of her poems during the Presidential Inauguration of President Bill Clinton in 1993, the first African-American to be so honored. She did not accomplish this fame through a series of easy steps or planned advancement to get from one position to another but simply took life as it was and continued to pursue her dreams and desires into the future. Perhaps what makes her most unique is her willingness to completely share the highs and lows of her life with her audience through her in-depth autobiographical works including details such as the sexual abuse she suffered as a child, the early pregnancy and birth of her son, Guy, and her period of life as a prostitute and then madam in San Francisco as a means of providing her son with the support he needed. Never one to remain stuck in a given profession simply for the support it provided, she is perhaps as well-known for her variety of interests and professional pursuits as she is for her candid honesty and unfaltering work to try to help disadvantaged women in all parts of the world, particularly Africa, which she adopted as her homeland. Tracing through her life and work, one quickly discovers the true American spirit at work in her variety, energy and ability to exploit her opportunities even as the unique black experience of America and its awakening to its own power can be discovered within the texts of her novels and poems. On April 4, 1928, a little girl given the name of Marguerite Annie Johnson was born in St. Louis, Missouri. She was welcomed into a small and somewhat unhappy family consisting of Bailey Johnson, who worked as a doorman and a naval dietician; Vivian Baxter Johnson, a real estate agent, trained surgical nurse and, eventually, a merchant marine; and a small brother only a year old who would become her best friend throughout most of her childhood, Bailey Jr. (Gillespie, 2007). This somewhat unhappy family broke apart just more than three years later and the small girl was sent with her only slightly older brother to live with her paternal grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. “In Stamps, the young girl experienced the racial discrimination that was the legally enforced way of life in the American South, but she also absorbed the deep religious faith and old-fashioned courtesy of traditional African American life” (America’s Renaissance Woman, 2005). As it is related in her autobiographical novel I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the family was relatively well-off during the Depression era and Maya, as she was nicknamed by her brother, was given an early introduction into society life. However, at the age of 7, her father unexpectedly returned Angelou and her brother to their mother’s care in St. Louis, where Angelou was raped by Mr. Freeman, her mother’s boyfriend at the time. This event had a tremendous impact on Angelou’s life. Although she only told one person what happened, her brother Bailey, Mr. Freeman was later killed by one of Angelou’s uncles and she blamed herself for having let it be known (Gillespie, 2007). Until she was 13, she wouldn’t use her voice again for fear that it would cause harm to someone else. Having been sent back to her grandmother following the rape incident, Angelou moved back with her mother in San Francisco at the age of 13 and began speaking again. “Maya attended Mission High School and won a scholarship to study dance and drama at San Francisco’s Labor School, where she was exposed to the progressive ideals that animated her later political activism” (America’s Renaissance Woman, 2005). She was well on her way to making history when she became the city’s first African American cable car conductor but this career was cut short when she returned to high school, just managing to graduate before her son, Guy, was born, making her a single mother at the age of 16 (Gillespie, 2007). To provide her son with a decent living, Angelou worked a variety of jobs, including waitress and cook, before she resorted to prostitution as the only means of actually making a living. Unsurprisingly, she went through a variety of romantic relationships during this period in time, most leading nowhere and relatively unfulfilling. Eventually, though, as she relates in another autobiographical book Gather Together in my Name, she became the madam of a whore house and was able to continue pursuing her dreams of acting and dancing. Through her relationships and her talent, Angelou was able to pull herself out of a life of crime in order to pursue her true dreams. Her career in performance was able to get its real start with a little support from her first husband, Tosh Angelous, who she married in 1952 (Gillespie, 2007). As her career began to soar, her relationship began to sour and the couple broke up soon after it started. However, she decided to keep the stage name she had given herself and continued to travel with her career. By 1960, she had fallen in love with Vusumzi Make, a South African civil rights activist, and the family (with Guy) moved to Egypt where Angelou made another career change, working as an editor for a newspaper (Gillespie, 2007). When this relationship fell apart, Angelou and Guy moved to Ghana where Angelou was both teacher and student until she met Malcolm X from American. Intending to help Malcolm X with his efforts, Angelou returned to America in 1964 just prior to Malcolm X’s assassination. Angelou became involved in the Civil Rights Movement anyway, working more closely with Martin Luther King Jr. Following MLK’s assassination, Angelou published her first book and became the public figure she is today. As even a short biography illustrates, Maya Angelou’s life is perhaps best characterized as a life full of change and adaptation. Her first paid position was as the first African American to conduct a street car in San Francisco thanks to a load of determination and encouragement from her mother. “She arrived every morning promptly at nine and made her application through the same receptionist, who kept telling her that they only hired through agencies or that there were no openings” (Shuker, 1990). After a month of persistent effort, she finally wore down the personnel director and achieved her position but decided to return to school the following spring in order to finish up her formal education. Following high school graduation, in the face of an economic slump for black people as a result of soldiers returning home from the war and desperate to support her infant son, Angelou again concealed the truth and managed to find a job as a Creole cook despite never having made Creole food before. Like many of the changes she made in life, this position was ended following a heartbreaking love affair she had with an engaged man that sent her into San Diego where she became a cocktail waitress and fell into the life of a prostitute (Shuker, 1990). Despite the dirty dealings she had as a prostitute and then as a madam, she always managed to keep her life as a mother clean and separate and to continue studying to pursue her dream to be a dancer. After a period of confusion realizing this double life was no good, Angelou cycled between work as a waitress, cook, dancer and even a second-hand dress seller before finally ending up as a sales clerk in a record shop frequently visited by Tosh Angelous, the man who would become her first husband (Gillespie, 2007). When this marriage fell apart, Angelou was ready to make a break from the chaotic life she’d been living. As in life, when Angelou decided to launch her career as a dancer, she found she had to do it from the bottom up. She managed to get a job in a sleazy strip club as a dancer with the additional responsibility of encouraging men to buy her drinks. While this sounded a great deal like her job as a prostitute, Angelou made some changes that brought this work into an acceptable range for her. She insisted on wearing street clothes while she talked with her customers, was forthright with them regarding the drinks and choreographed her dances to demonstrate her real skill and variety (Shuker, 1990). This unique quality of her work eventually attracted the attention of the cabaret crowd and Angelou’s career was launched. From her first position as a singer in the Purple Onion where she first appeared as ‘Maya Angelou’, Angelou become a San Francisco sensation and from there went on to audition for parts on Broadway and on European tours with Porgy and Bess (Shuker, 2005). However, Europe was too far away from her son, so Angelou quit Porgy and Bess and began touring the west coast with Guy in tow. As the years passed, she began incorporating more of her own work into her act and had progressed on to recording records. However, as the black community became more active in seeking civil rights, Angelou began questioning her own purpose in life and experimenting with other forms of expression, such as writing. Working in New York, Angelou launched herself into her writing career in much the same way that she had earlier launched herself into her singing career – she simply began writing. At about the same time, Martin Luther King Jr. and the SCLC came to New York to try to raise money for their nonviolent protest efforts in the south. Eager to help, Angelou and her new friends developed a plan to produce a fund-raising play that pulled her into full involvement with the civil rights movement. Through her work with the SCLC, she met and married Vusumzi Make, quitting her budding writing career in order to follow him around New York, London and into Cairo. Constantly struggling to free herself from the oppressive atmosphere of her married life, Angelou again turned to writing as a means of relieving the family’s debt problems, this time as an editor for a local newspaper (Gillespie, 2007). She regained her independence and, following her son’s graduation, again launched off on her own by moving with Guy to Ghana and taking a position as a professor of theater while her son recovered from a serious car accident (Shuker, 2005). With Guy fully launched into his own life, Angelou traveled a bit more as an actress before again accepting an activist post with Malcolm X back in the United States. After his death, she continued to work with Martin Luther King Jr. on the Civil Rights Movement until his death and then moved out to the west coast again, supporting herself since the 1970s on her writing, acting, teaching and appearances. Unsurprisingly, the work of Maya Angelou provides profound insight into the American black experience from before the advent of the Civil Rights Movement to the present day in which it is possible for a black man to become President of the United States. In her first novel, commonly classified as autobiographical fiction, she illustrates the poignant ways in which racism and oppression functioned to shape her personality and perceptions. From the second page, she informs her reader of the self-image many young black girls had in her era, dreaming of the day when she would wake “out of my black ugly dream, and my real hair, which was long and blond, would take the place of the kinky mass that Momma wouldn’t let me straighten? My light-blue eyes were going to hypnotize them … Because I was really white and because a cruel fairy stepmother, who was understandably jealous of my beauty, had turned me into a too-big Negro girl” (Angelou 1985). In Angelou’s narrative, again and again it is shown how she is abused, neglected, oppressed and caged in as a simple result of her color rather than her rights as a human being. In this book, and all of her remaining biographical fiction accounts, the life of the black people is also demonstrated to be a life spent searching for the chinks in the various roadblocks established by white people designed to keep black people from making any real progress, often forcing them to turn to crime or cons in order to simply get by. While an examination of her autobiographies is enlightening regarding the conditions of black people in America throughout her life, Angelou manages to capture the spirit of her people in her famous poem “Still I Rise.” In this poem, she combines brilliant rhythm with strong imagery and determined repetition to illustrate the unfailing spirit that enabled her to overcome the difficulties she encountered in life. She defies the white man’s attempt to suppress her within the first stanza, “You may write me down in history / With your bitter twisted lies, / You may trod me in the very dirt / But still, like dust, I’ll rise” (Angelou 1-4). She steals the analogy developed by the white man, that black people are little more than dust under their feet, but twists it to illustrate the truth of the matter, that this dust cannot ever be completely cleaned away and will always continue to rise in its true form. Moving into the latter portion of her poem, she claims these same rights of humanity in claiming her womanhood, speaking for feminists everywhere as she asks, “Does my sexiness upset you? / Does it come as a surprise / That I dance like I’ve got diamonds / At the meeting of my thighs” (Angelou 23-26). Ending the poem with a triple repetition of the phrase “Still I rise” emphasizes that there is no one and nothing that can keep this black woman down, serving as inspiration and rallying call for everyone who has ever felt downtrodden or blocked in their course. Through her life and work, Maya Angelou epitomizes the American spirit despite living in conditions that continuously attempted to crush her under. She demonstrates how a single person, despite numerous hardships, can use sheer determination and imagination to fashion an amazing and influential life for herself and those she loves. From a young girl born in the Jim Crow era, full of racial oppression and constant vigilance against the Klu Klux Klan lynching gangs to speaking on behalf of a President coming into office, Maya Angelou captures within her life the course of the American black person from the dust to the Oval Office. In watching Barak Obama, a black man with a black wife and black children, not only achieve success but win nationwide approval for the highest office available, she must feel she spoke well when welcoming another liberal president into the office and thinking about the hopes and dreams of those who have gone before her: “Lift up your eyes upon / This day breaking for you. / Give birth again / To the dream” (Angelou 1993). Regardless of whether one is black, white, male, female or lost in some nether world of in-betweens, Maya Angelou encourages one to live life for its enjoyment, seize hold of the opportunities available and constantly strive, constantly reach, constantly rise, for something better and closer to the vision one has inside of what could, should or might be. References “America’s Renaissance Woman.” American Academy of Achievement. (August 26, 2005). Available November 12, 2008 from Angelou, Maya. And Still I Rise. New York: Random House, 1978. Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York: Bantam, (1969); 1985. Angelou, Maya. On the Pulse of Morning. Spoken at the Presidential Inauguration Ceremony. (January 20, 1993). Available November 12, 2008 from Gillespie, Marcia; Rosa Johnson Butler; Richard A. Long. Maya Angelou: A Glorious Celebration. New York: Doubleday, 2007. Shuker, Nancy. Maya Angelou. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Silver Burdett Press, 2005. Read More