Letter to My Daughter - Maya Angelou [19]
I finally released Cambridge because I am a southern woman who does not do snow with any grace, and each year Cambridge, Massachusetts, has more snow than would make me comfortable.
Once I was settled in Winston-Salem, Dr. Ed Wilson, provost of the university and Dr. Tom Mullin, who offered me a position a decade earlier, came to me and offered a Reynolds Professorship with a lifetime appointment. I thanked them and said I would take it for a year to see if I liked teaching, and indeed if I liked Winston-Salem.
Within three months of teaching, I had an enormous revelation; I realized I was not a writer who teaches, but a teacher who writes.
On earlier visits to North Carolina, I had made friends with the chairman of the English Department, Elizabeth Phillips, and other faculty members. On evenings after dinner and afternoons after lunch, I asked them questions, which had befuddled me. I needed to know how had they accepted the idea of segregation? Did they really believe that black people were inferior to whites? Did they think that black people were born with a contagious ailment, which made it dangerous to sit next to us on buses while allowing us to cook their meals and even breast-feed their babies?
I was heartened to hear my new colleagues answer me with candor, honesty, embarrassment, and some contrition. “Truly, I didn’t think about it. It had always been and it seemed it would always be.” “I did think about it but I didn’t think there was anything I could do to change the situation.” “When the black youngsters protested by sitting at the 5 & Dime store counter in Greensboro, I was so proud. I remember wishing that I was black and I could go join them.”
Whether I liked it or not I had to admit that I understood the sense of helplessness of my colleagues. Their responses confirmed my belief that courage is the most important of all the virtues. I thought, had I been white during the segregation era, I also might have taken the line of least resistance.
I began healing when I settled in Winston-Salem. The undulating landscape is replete with flowering dogwood, redbud, crepe myrtle trees, six-foot-tall rhododendron. Multicolored four-foot-wide azaleas grow wild and wonderful throughout the area.
Winston-Salem is in the Piedmont, it is literally at the foot of the mountains. The mountains that lean over us are the Great Smokies and the Blue Ridge. I like the humor in North Carolina. The natives say that our state is the valley of humility, towered over by two towers of conceit, Virginia and South Carolina.
I was happy to find good museums, excellent churches with choirs to match, a first-class school of the arts, which supplied stars for Broadway plays and a violinist chair for the New York Symphony.
I fell for the soft singing accent of the natives and their creative ways with English. In the supermarket the checker asked me how did I like Winston-Salem? I replied, “I like it, but it gets so hot. I don’t know if I can bear it.”
The checker, not breaking her stride in totaling my items said to me, “Yes, Dr. Angelou, but it gone get gone.”
I found and joined Mt. Zion Baptist Church with its great choirs and devoted minister. There is nearby a principal and training hospital for the town. One of my colleagues focused her interest on Emily Dickinson and another on eighteenth-and nineteenth-century European poetry, which meant I could find friends to discuss poetry, one of my most favorite subjects.
Winston-Salem is not without difficulties. Racism still rages behind many smiling faces, and women are still spoken of in some circles, as conveniently pretty vessels. My late friend John O. Killens once said to me, “Macon, Georgia, is down south, New York City is up south.”
Blithering ignorance can be found wherever you choose to live.
The late nineteenth- and twentieth-century great African American poet, Anne Spencer, loved Virginia and loved