My friend’s new husband used to deliver Maya Angelou’s mail. They changed his route last year, so he doesn’t anymore, but he used to. As soon as I heard, I imagined taking a trip. The town they live in couldn’t be more than six or seven hours away. I could be there in the same amount of time it takes me to get to the beach, and I’ve been known to drive to the beach and back over a weekend.
But I didn’t. I didn’t make that trip. Truth be told, the idea never became much more than that…something I thought about now and then…a musing atop a pile of reverie in a corner of my brain that never gets enough light to grow anything.
I hadn’t read her books, either. The first time I heard the title “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings” was when a high school English teacher added it to her “suggested” reading list. This was the same teacher that required us to read books like “Great Expectations”, “The Scarlet Letter”, and “1984”. And, I had to read them! No Cliff’s Notes for this girl! My mother’s eyes narrowed when she saw those distinctive yellow and black stripes among my classmates’ books. I worried sometimes she’d stop letting me be friends with those girls, like the time she told me I couldn’t go over to Tina Green’s house anymore, because Tina Green’s house was not a house. It was an apartment and only itinerants lived in apartments.
I don’t know if it’s because of, or in spite of, the fact that I actually had to read those torture devices of semi-modern literature, but I remember quite a lot about all three of those books. If only “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings” had made the required list.
But it was Atlanta. And it was the 70’s. Just a few years before, my mother had fired the last of a succession of large black women who dressed like nurses to do the ironing. Shortly afterwards we moved to north Atlanta only to be bussed back to south Atlanta schools. That’s where I met Kathy whose blackness escaped me until I learned we were moving again. More north this time. So north that there wasn’t any chance of making any black friends. Mother took the scrap of paper with Kathy’s telephone number on it. “You won’t be needing this.”
Oprah Winfrey introduced me to Maya Angelou when I was a new mother and anxious for every kind of reassurance. Her voice, as it slid from her mouth, down the front of her blouse, and into her gorgeously expressive, caramel-colored hands reminded me of Mae, my favorite of my mother’s maids. Like Maya, she was a large woman and handsome, and when she wasn’t using her mouth for soothing, she was smiling. Often she did both at the same time.
It wasn’t until I read “Phenomenal Woman” though, that I began to truly appreciate the gift of Maya Angelou. I saw myself there. I think we all did. Maya had a way of working words like dough until they formed something that fed us all. She was the epitome of civilized in a world that seems to have forgotten the meaning of the word and, as long as she was there…waiting for me to visit, there was hope. There will never be another like her.
Are We There Yet? 