MAYA ANGELOU AND ME (Cheri)

To be sure, this is more like connected stories I might tell during an afternoon, while piecing a jigsaw puzzle with you, rather than evidence of a close connection . . .

Photo credit:  John David Mercer - AP

Maya Angelou led an intense, varied, hyper-literate life.  According to Wikipedia:

She became a poet and writer after a string of odd jobs during her young adulthood.  
These included fry cook, sex worker, nightclub performer, Porgy and Bess cast member, Southern Christian Leadership Conference coordinator, and correspondent in
Egypt and Ghana during the decolonization of Africa.

She was also an actress, writer, director, and producer of plays, movies, and
public television programs. In 1982, she was named the first Reynolds Professor
of American Studies at Wake Forest University . . . .  

She was active in the Civil Rights Movement and worked with
Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.  

Beginning in the 1990s, she made approximately 80 appearances a year
on the lecture circuit, something she continued into her eighties.  

In 1993, Angelou recited her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" (1993) at the first inauguration of Bill Clinton, making her the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since
Robert Frost at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1961.

I First Got to Know Her When . . .

I read Ms. Angelou's original book, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings when I was very young, as in maybe 11 years old.  It chronicles her early life, which pivoted when her mother's boyfriend raped her at the age of eight.

I remember picking the book up after my mother read it, having checked it out from the library, and always wondered why she let me read it at such a young age.  It did me no harm, and certainly introduced me to new subject matter, but it wouldn't have been her style.

It was only recently that I realized that my mother must have never read the book herself.  She felt that "non-productive" activities weren't a good use of time, so tended to only read either religious books or research for her investment business.  I'm thinking that I checked that book out of the library myself.

So Close

I have wanted to read Ms. Angelou's other memoirs, but have been waiting to pick up audio versions, also, to find a time to sew or quilt while listening!

When we traveled to visit Mark's family in Texas for Christmas 2021, we drove through Stamps, Arkansas, and I saw that Ms. Angelou had lived a large part of her  childhood in that tiny town (fewer than 1,300 residents now; about 2,400 in 1940).

I may have seen this mural as we drove through on Highway 82:

(A temporary marker honoring Angelou, and three historical markers recognizing Black legislators from the area, were stolen from Stamps just after the city's first Black mayor was elected in 2017.)

Given the richness of Ms. Angelou's life, I was awe-struck at the town's minuscule size and wanted to stop to explore it, but we just did not have the time.  I vowed not to over-schedule future vacations, so that we would always be able to take unscheduled stops in the future.

I've been buying the oversized atlases for each state that we travel through, and highlighting our routes, but we didn't have the Arkansas atlas in time to do that during our first trip, in 2021.

We spent a couple of days traveling southwest through Arkansas on our second trip to Texas this last December.  We had decided to stop for dinner in Texarkana when we saw a virtual ghost town bordering the highway:  Lewisville, Arkansas.  We quickly pulled over and  each of us practically ran through the town taking pictures.  Mark took nearly 50 pictures in the fading light, and I snapped almost 30.

It was only after we got to Texas afterwards that I realized that Lewisville is only five miles from Stamps . . . as in the town that sparked my "I'm not going to miss another town like that" vow.  (In 2021 we had been coming from an entirely different direction.)

Maya Angelou Lived Much Happier Times Just Down the Road From Here

A fellow quilter recommended the book Bitter Blood to me last year.  (If you appreciate intricate true-crime, you might want to get it on Kindle, to avoid reading a thick, small paperback.  You would definitely want to do as Mark suggested and keep a detailed family tree as you read.  The author goes back several generations and there is a lot of repetition of family names.)

I knew that my friend had said that the book was based partly in Winston-Salem, but didn't realize that one of the sets of murders took place about four mile down the main road from our house.

Even more of a surprise was that Maya Angelou lived across the street from the apparently very lovely people who were killed.

Here is a link to a very interesting article about Angelou's homes and writing habits, written in 2015, when the house went on the market after her death.  The beginning is heart-warming:

Maya Angelou's home of 20 years in Winston-Salem, North Carolina,
was once dotted with birdcages.

One, blue and standing 6 feet tall, sat outside the gate near what Angelou dubbed the “dance pavilion” (formerly a pool), while eight more hovered near the guest cottage, according to the Wall Street Journal. The cages were a nod to her most famous novel,
“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” – the proceeds of which helped pay for the home.

Check out the pictures of one of her parties, at the top of the article!