At the great buffet of life, Maya Angelou always has come away with a full plate, dining “with all my appetites,” she says.
Now entering her 75th year, she has been savoring birthday cake and desserts of other kinds lately.
Her way with words has yielded a deal with Hallmark, the greeting card company, to create a line called Maya Angelou Life Mosaic–cards, pillows, journals, framed prints and wind chimes.
For Angelou’s 74th birthday two weeks ago, Oprah Winfrey devoted a show to celebrating her life, her new Hallmark venture and her new book, “A Song Flung Up to Heaven” (Random House, $23.95), the sixth and last installment of a biographical series that began more than 30 years ago.
Upon her return home to Winston-Salem, N.C., she had plans to join her son, who lives in California, and friends for a small, private party before going on to Atlanta for another celebration.
She celebrates the years of her life now. For a long time she didn’t.
On her 40th birthday–April 4, 1968–Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and she lost her appetite for candles, cake and celebration.
Her new book covers roughly the four years before then, from the time she returned to the U.S. after living in Ghana until she sat down to begin writing the book that brought her acclaim, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.”
Only a few months before his death, King had asked Angelou to travel the country to help promote a poor people’s march he was planning in Washington later that year.
Devastated by his death, she went into hibernation for a few weeks, not wanting to talk to anyone.
It wasn’t the first time she hit the mute button on her life. At age 8, her mother’s boyfriend raped her. Days later the man was found dead, and in response, feeling somehow responsible for his fate, she refused to speak for six years.
She still finds comfort in giving her voice time out.
“It’s good to take a day away from everybody, everything when I need it most,” she says. “I just close down. . . . I have a library and I get my coffee and bottle of wine. I don’t even try to talk.”
Less talk, more listening
And, she has come to believe, less talk makes people better listeners.
“If you stop, don’t try to listen, just stop and breathe deeply, you can sense something. Hearing is not it,” she says. “It’s another sense other than hearing. I’m always amazed at the paucity of human imagination to think there are only five senses. There are probably 5 million,” she says, her eyes twinkling.
That twinkle and warmth have a way of drawing people–famous and anonymous–into Angelou’s sphere.
Back during her years as a performer, journalist, playwright and poet, Angelou came in contact with a dazzling assortment of personalities, many who became admirers and friends: Billie Holiday, James Baldwin, Jules Feiffer, Cicely Tyson, Nelson Mandela, Malcolm X, Coretta Scott King. Later, President Bill Clinton asked her to write a poem for his first inauguration.
What draws people to her?
“People feel safe with me,” she says. “I’m not going to belittle them, ridicule anybody. I’m not going to knock somebody off, slough them off. People feel that, and they’re right.”
Something else draws people to Angelou, her openness about who she is.
Starting with “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” in 1969, she has shared the details of her rocky childhood, exposed her encounters with prejudice and laid bare her passions. She has written about her beloved brother and mother, both who have passed away. And, long before society accepted single motherhood, she wrote about the challenges and triumphs of raising a child alone.
But one fact about herself she has not revealed.
“I’ve never told anyone how many times I’ve been married,” she says. “And the reason for that is people tend to think that if a person marries frequently, she or he is frivolous, capricious. In each marriage, I went into it with all my appetites, my humor, my appetite for sex, for food . . . my appetite for knowing things and sharing.
On leaving without apology
“However, when the relationship became abusive I left it. It doesn’t mean that the person has to physically beat you. They wear down your spirit, and if you see that happening, you have to say goodbye.”
Besides her appetite for love and companionship (she told Oprah: “Someone is still calling me Darling”), Angelou spent years indulging a passion for places. She makes her home in Winston-Salem, N.C., in a rambling house surrounded by trees and a lush garden. But over the years, she has called many places home–from San Francisco to Cairo to New York and other spots in between.
“Going about the world, when I went to a city, I did my best to find my place in it. When I didn’t, I left it. I went to the next city with all my appetites intact, hoping, willing to work. I worked very hard. And [was] willing to laugh and willing to play, and when it didn’t work, I left it, without apology.”
That is central to her philosophy–be sensitive to the feelings of others but unapologetic about doing what is right. She has no compunction about asking someone who says or does something inappropriate to leave her home, which has become a kind of sanctuary for friends who often stop in to refresh themselves. She calls it a healing home.
“I establish peace in my home and I protect the peace,” she says. And if someone becomes combative while visiting, “I don’t want their spirit in my home.”
In addition to her home in Winston-Salem, where she is a lifetime professor of American studies at Wake Forest University, she keeps an apartment in New York and continues to travel widely lecturing and teaching. Next month, she will deliver the commencement address at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her summer plans include directing her second feature film based on Bebe Moore Campbell’s “Singing in the Comeback Choir.” She also directed the 1998 film “Down in the Delta” that starred Alfre Woodard.
Lately she has been working on a new book of poetry, a gourmet cookbook, and what she calls “epigrams” for her Hallmark-produced cards and collectibles. She says it’s hard work to distill her ideas into short pieces. Still, her distinctive voice comes through:
“The happy heart runs with the river/ floats on the air/ lifts to the music/ soars with the eagle/ hopes with the prayer.”
Along with her lyrical stature, Angelou has physical stature to match. A former dancer, she is 6 feet tall and strides gracefully through a lobby, despite the fact her knees have gone, she says. She keeps a carved walking stick for support.
As for how to carry oneself, she offers this message for women today:
“It’s important to be female. That is, if you were born with a certain genitalia, you should revel in it. There’s a world of difference between being female and being a woman . . . you have to say `I take responsibility for myself, for the time I take up and the space I occupy.’ Then that means you’re en route to becoming a woman, not just an old female.
“And a woman tends to be kind. A female could be a bitch. But a woman tends to take time. A woman tends to be patient. A woman tends to be judiciously selective [about] where she’s going to spend her time.”
And, Angelou adds, a woman feeds her soul with laughter. “The Bible tells us that cheerful spirit is good medicine.”
