| Maya
Angelou at 80: "Life is Still An Adventure"
By
HILLEL ITALIE
AP National Writer
NEW
YORK (AP) _ It takes just seconds to leave behind
this muted Harlem side street and enter the parlor of Maya
Angelou's brownstone, a step as bright and quick as a black
and white film dissolving into Technicolor.
Plump sofas and
armchairs in bursts of green and blue and red and yellow form
a ring on spotless hardwood floors. Toward the rear, like
a shy, well-dressed prodigy, a baby grand piano looks shined
to stage perfection. By the piano, stained glass doors open
to a red dining area centered by a mahogany table as big and
round as the voice of Angelou herself.
Still
close to her youthful height of 6 feet, the author-poet-dancer-singer-activist
is ready to celebrate her 80th birthday, feeling, she says,
like she's 60, wearing a dark blouse and slacks, sipping apple
juice, singing hymns, reciting Latin, whispering, laughing,
crying, missing lost friends or planning to make new ones.
``I don't
know how long I'm going to live, but I still see my life as
an adventure,'' says Angelou, who divides her time between
New York and a house in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
She has
filled six volumes of memoirs with her wild, tragic, unstoppable
story: growing up with segregation as a child and motherhood
at 17; strip clubs and brothels to nightclubs and Broadway;
the assassinations of her friends Malcolm X and the Rev.
Martin Luther King Jr.; a classic memoir, Hallmark cards and
the adoration of **>Oprah Winfrey.<**
Wealthy
and famous beyond even her admittedly immodest dreams, she
is no closer to settling down than she was decades ago. She
is working on a new book, a collection of nonfiction pieces;
travels the country giving speeches for which she earns thousands
of dollars; and plans to spend part of the year studying at
the Missouri-based Unity Church, which advocates healing through
prayer.
``About
three years ago, I was in Miami and my son (Guy) was having
his 10th operation on his spine. I felt really done in by
the work I was doing, people who had expected things of me,''
says Angelou, who then recalled a Unity church service she
attended in Miami.
``The
preacher came out _ a young black man, mostly a white church
_ and he came out and said, `I have only one question to ask,
and that is, ``Why have you decided to limit God?``' And I
thought, `That's exactly what I've been doing.' So then he
asked me to speak, and I got up and said, `Thank you, thank
you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.' And I said
it about 50 times, until the audience began saying it with
me, `Thank you, THANK YOU!'
``I got
back in the car, when I was being driven back to the house
I had taken, and I said, `On my 80th birthday I will go into
a kind of religious school and study.' I don't want to become
a preacher, but I want to see if there's another way, a more
direct way into the soul's search.''
She has
written that when the road ahead is blocked, and the one behind
cut off, then a new path must be created. Angelou's life does
not follow a straight, flat line, but takes detour upon detour,
an ascending circle that covers rich and poor, city and country,
art and commerce, shock and sentiment, Malcolm X and the good
people of Hallmark Cards, Inc.
``(When)
I was about 12, I guess, I read the statement, `I am a human
being. Nothing human can be alien to me.' The statement is
so complex, so simple,'' she says, quoting the Roman playwright
Terence.
``Homo
sum: humani nil a me alienum puto.' I have been internalizing
that all my life. So if **>Kobe<** Abe of Japan thinks
a great thought, if Federico Garcia Lorca, or Carlos Santana
writes a great line of music or a great poem, Balzac and Wole
Soyinka ...
ALL of it is mine. And I take it all!''
Angelou
was born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri, on April
4, 1928. She was raised in Stamps, Arkansas, and San Francisco,
moving back and forth between her parents and her grandmother.
She was smart and fresh to the point of danger, packed off
by her family to California after sassing a white store clerk
in Arkansas. Other times, she didn't speak at all: at age
7, she was raped by her mother's boyfriend and didn't speak
for years. She learned by reading, and listening.
``I loved
the poetry that was sung in the black church: `Go down Moses,
way down in Egypt's land,''' she says. ``It just seemed to
me the most wonderful way of talking. And `Deep River.' Ooh!
Even now it can catch me. And then I started reading, really
reading, at about seven and a half, because a woman in my
town took me to the library, a black school library. ... And
I read every book, even if I didn't understand it.''
At age
9, she was writing poetry. By 17, she was a single mother.
In her early 20s, she danced at a strip joint, ran a brothel,
was married, then divorced. By her mid-20s, she was performing
at the Purple Onion in San Francisco, where she shared billing
with another future star, Phyllis Diller.
``I had
never met anybody in the world like her,'' says Diller, still
a close friend. ``She was brilliant, talented, tall, and she
had this great talent for dancing and singing. She had this
very special, resonant voice. It had a certain quality. With
Sinatra, he would sing one note and you knew who it was. It's
a recognizable sound, and she had that, too.''
Renamed
Maya Angelou for the stage, she toured in the Gershwins'
``Porgy and Bess'' and Jean Genet's ``The Blacks,'' danced
with Alvin Ailey, worked as a coordinator for the Southern
Christian Leadership Council and lived for years in Egypt
and Ghana, where she befriended Malcolm X and remained close
to him until his assassination, in 1965. Three years later,
she was helping King organize the Poor People's March in Memphis,
Tennessee, where the civil rights leader was slain on Angelou's
40th birthday.
``Every
year, on that day, Coretta and I would send each other flowers,''
Angelou said of King's widow, Coretta Scott King, who died
in 2006.
Little
known outside the theatrical world in her 20s and 30s, she
became a best-selling author in her early 40s. Angelou's ``I
Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,'' published in 1970, has sold
millions of copies and become a standard, if controversial,
coming-of-age story, taught throughout the country.
The book
might not have happened if James Baldwin hadn't persuaded
Angelou, still grieving over King's death, to attend a party
at Jules Feiffer's house.
``There
were a number of writers at the party, good talkers,''
recalls Bob Loomis, her longtime editor at Random House and
the man who helped push her to write the book.
``Judy
Feiffer, Jules' wife, called me and said she had met the most
remarkable woman and that she had told wonderful stories and
more than held her own with people known to be raconteurs
and entertainers. And she said, `You ought to get her to write
a book.'''
Alice
Walker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, says she found
Angelou's book ``incredibly powerful and marvelous in its
capacity to move people to share her experiences.'' Walker's
daughter, memoirist Rebecca Walker, remembered reading Angelou
in seventh grade and said ``Caged Bird'' helped her find her
voice and make her ``own way in the world, come what may.''
Angelou's
memoir also has been attacked, for seemingly opposite reasons.
In a 1999 essay in Harper's, author Francine Prose criticized
``Caged Bird'' as ``manipulative'' melodrama. Meanwhile, Angelou's
passages about her rape and teen pregnancy have made it a
perennial on the American Library Association's list of works
that draw complaints from parents and educators.
```I thought
that it was a mild book. There's no profanity,'' Angelou says.
``It speaks about surviving, and it really doesn't make ogres
of many people. I was shocked to find there were people who
really wanted it banned, and I still believe people who are
against the book have never read the book.''
She has
written five other memoirs and mastered several languages.
She has published several volumes of poems, advice books and
children's stories. She has written music, plays and screenplays,
received an Emmy nomination for her acting in ``Roots,'' and
still has a passion for dance, the art she considers closest
to poetry.
``The
only things I ever really loved were writing and dancing,
and at 800 I will still be dancing. I'll still think in terms
of the long leg and extension, releves, and still love it,''
she says.
``The line of the dancer. If you watch Baryshnikov, and you
see that line, that's what the poet tries for. The poet tries
for the line, the balance.''
She has
evolved from outcast to bohemian to celebrity to institution.
In 1993, the poem she read at former President Clinton's first
inauguration, ``On the Pulse of the Morning,'' was a million-selling
sensation. She is a mentor to Winfrey, who will throw a party
for her 80th birthday. Since 2002, she has been composing
verse for Hallmark, calling it _ however commercial _ part
of her mission as ``the people's poet.''
``My intent
is to see a person read 30 pages of the book of mine, or five
poems, before he knows he's reading. I like him to just get
in there,'' she says.
``So in
order to do that, I have to take these things, words. ...
Everybody in the world uses them, from morning until night.
Words. You have to take some nouns and pronouns and adjectives
and adverbs, ball them together and throw them against the
wall and let them bounce.
``I've
got to do it.''
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