The Heart of a Woman - Maya Angelou [0]
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Gather Together in My Name
Singin and Swingin' and Gettin Merry Like Christmas
All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes
A Song Flung Up to Heaven
ESSAYS
Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now
Even the Stars Look Lonesome
Letter to My Daughter
POETRY
Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie
Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well
And Still I Rise
Shaker, Why Don't You Sing?
I Shall Not Be Moved
On the Pulse of Morning
Phenomenal Woman
The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou
A Brave and Startling Truth
Amazing Peace
Mother
Celebrations
CHILDREN'S BOOKS
My Painted House, My Friendly Chicken, and Me
Kofi and His Magic
PICTURE BOOKS
Now Sheba Sings the Song
Life Doesn't Frighten Me
COOKBOOK
Hallelujah! The Welcome Table
I dedicate this book to my grandson,
Colin Ashanti Murphy-Johnson
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to a few of the many
sister/friends whose love encourages me
to spell my name:
WOMAN
Doris Bullard
Rosa Guy
M. J. Hewitt
Ruth Love
Paule Marshall
Louise Merriwether
Dolly McPherson
Emalyn Rogers
Efuah Sutherland
Decca Treuhaft
Frances Williams
A. B. Williamson
“The ole ark's a-moverin', a-moverin', a-moverin', the ole ark's a-moverin' along”
That ancient spiritual could have been the theme song of the United States in 1957. We were a-moverin' to, fro, up, down and often in concentric circles.
We created a maze of contradictions. Black and white Americans danced a fancy and often dangerous do-si-do. In our steps forward, abrupt turns, sharp spins and reverses, we became our own befuddlement. The country hailed Althea Gibson, the rangy tennis player who was the first black female to win the U.S. Women's Singles. President Dwight Eisenhower sent U.S. paratroopers to protect black school children in Little Rock, Arkansas, and South Carolina's Senator Strom Thurmond harangued for 24 hours and 18 minutes to prevent the passage in Congress of the Civil Rights Commission's Voting Rights Bill.
Sugar Ray Robinson, everybody's dandy, lost his middle weight title, won it back, then lost it again, all in a matter of months. The year's popular book was Jack Kerouac's On the Road, and its title was an apt description of our national psyche. We were indeed traveling, but no one knew our destination nor our arrival date.
I had returned to California from a year-long European tour as premier dancer with Porgy and Bess. I worked months singing in West Coast and Hawaiian night clubs and saved my money. I took my young son, Guy, and joined the beatnik brigade. To my mother's dismay, and Guy's great pleasure, we moved across the Golden Gate Bridge and into a houseboat commune in Sausalito where I went barefoot, wore jeans, and both of us wore rough-dried clothes. Although I took Guy to a San Francisco barber, I allowed my own hair to grow into a wide unstraightened hedge, which made me look, at a distance, like a tall brown tree whose branches had been clipped. My commune mates, an icthyologist, a musician, a wife, and an inventor, were white, and had they been political, (which they were not), would have occupied a place between the far left and revolution.
Strangely, the houseboat offered me respite from racial tensions, and gave my son an opportunity to be around whites who did not think of him as too exotic to need correction, nor so common as to be ignored.
During our stay in Sausalito, my mother struggled with her maternal instincts. On her monthly visits, dressed in stone marten furs, diamonds and spike heels, which constantly caught between loose floorboards, she forced smiles and held her tongue. Her eyes, however, were frightened for her baby, and her baby's baby. She left wads of money under my pillow or gave me checks as she kissed me goodbye. She could have relaxed had she remembered the Biblical assurance “Fruit does not fall far from the tree.”
In less than a year, I began to yearn for privacy, wall-to-wall carpets