A Praise Song for Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou April 4, 1928—May 28, 2014

Photo by Dwight Carter Photograpty ©DwightCarter.com

Maya Angelou named her fifth published memoir All of God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes—an apt declaration for the great American poet, activist, dancer, and teacher who spent her life in motion, pushing past barriers of straw and stone as she claimed her rightful place on the world’s grand stages. As a memoirist, she allowed us the same intimacy of her interiority as the prima ballerina allows of the physical form, and by doing so profoundly affected—even liberated—generations of readers. As a poet, she distilled her experience, our experience, into imagery and verse that woke the heart. She became an exalted cultural figure, knowing a stature and influence uncommon for poets, much less Black women poets. On May 28, 2014, Maya Angelou died a great American woman recognized as such, beloved across races and borders.

Marguerite Johnson was born in St. Louis on April 4, 1928, daughter of Bailey Johnson and Vivian Baxter. At the age of three Marguerite and her brother Bailey were sent by train, alone, en route to their paternal grandmother in rural Stamps, Arkansas. Raised in a home of abiding faith, love, and learning, this sensitive girl knew the protection and values of her family community. But this was also the Deep South. Two times she would be shuttled quickly out of Arkansas when her grandmother feared for the children’s lives—first, when Bailey witnessed a murdered, mutilated black man dragged from a pond, and second, when Marguerite, fresh from being in California, told a white store clerk exactly what she thought of her rude behavior.

However, one departure from Arkansas for the Johnson children was a calm one—in Bailey Sr.’s De Soto. In 1935, Bailey Johnson collected them and returned them to their mother, Vivian, in St. Louis. While the children were thrilled to be reunited with the object of their distant love, this was the home, the parental bedroom, where Marguerite was to be raped by her mother’s boyfriend. She testified against the accused and he was convicted. Vigilantes got to him first. After his murder, a traumatized Marguerite refused to speak. Their mother soon sent the children back to Stamps.

This survived experience was central to the narrative of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou’s first memoir. So was the aftermath. We witnessed a girl growing up and trying to make sense of acts of horror that were out of her control. Mrs. Flowers, an admired Stamps townswoman, befriended Marguerite, became a mentor who gave her books. This attention—especially when Mrs. Flowers told Marguerite that if she truly loved poetry, she must read it aloud—pushed Marguerite to speak to the world again.

As Marguerite grew up, the motion accelerated, but she was not just running from danger or being shifted between family members—she was making a life for herself, taking great leaps, long legs in beautiful extension. Her mother taught her that “every tub must sit on its own bottom” and Marguerite took that to heart.

At the age of fourteen, she fought her way to becoming San Francisco’s first black female trolley car conductor. Later she won a scholarship for dance instruction at the California Labor School. An unwed mother at age seventeen, she became even more determined to walk through any door slammed in her face. She applied to the US Army’s Officer Candidate School. They accepted her, only to reject her due to accusations of Communist activity at her dance school. Regardless, she persevered. She taught herself creole cooking and worked as a chef, then a fry cook. Barely out of her teens, she turned the tables on two predatory female sex workers and pushed them into her service. She profited as a madam, but when an altercation with one of the prostituted women brought fear of the police, and ultimately, fear of being declared an unfit mother and losing her son, she quit the...