![]() Her love of literature, as she later wrote, helped restore language to her.Īs a teenager, living with her mother in San Francisco, she studied dance and drama at the California Labor School and became the first black woman to work as a streetcar conductor there. An upright woman known as Momma, “with her solid air packed around her like cotton,” she is a warm, stabilizing presence throughout “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.”īelieving that her words had brought about the death, Maya did not speak for the next five years. Their grandmother, Annie Henderson, owned a general store “in the heart of the Negro area,” Ms. Angelou was known as Rita, Ritie or Maya, her older brother’s childhood nickname for her.Īfter her parents’ marriage ended, 3-year-old Maya was sent with her 4-year-old brother, Bailey, to live with their father’s mother in the tiny town of Stamps, Ark., which, she later wrote, “with its dust and hate and narrowness was as South as it was possible to get.” Angelou’s 2013 account of life with her mother, “Mom & Me & Mom,” became a best seller.) As a girl, Ms. Her beautiful, volatile mother, Vivian Baxter, was variously a nurse, hotel owner and card dealer. ![]() “How maddening it was to have been born in a cotton field with aspirations of grandeur.” Angelou did not celebrate her birthday.) Her dashing, defeated father, Bailey Johnson Sr., a Navy dietitian, “was a lonely person, searching relentlessly in bottles, under women’s skirts, in church work and lofty job titles for his ‘personal niche,’ lost before birth and unrecovered since,” Ms. King’s assassination, on April 4, 1968, Ms. She was also intimately concerned with sensation, describing the world around her - be it Arkansas, San Francisco or the foreign cities in which she lived - with palpable feeling for its sights, sounds and smells. Angelou’s prose style included a directness of voice that recalls African-American oral tradition and gives her work the quality of testimony. Angelou wrote in “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” “If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat,” Ms. As a whole, her work offered a cleareyed examination of the ways in which the socially marginalizing forces of racism and sexism played out at the level of the individual. ![]() Angelou explored the concepts of personal identity and resilience through the multifaceted lens of race, sex, family, community and the collective past. Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor. Maya Angelou in 1969, the year of her landmark memoir. ![]()
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