- Maya Angelou spoke of the son she conceived at 16 as her “greatest blessing”
Renowned poet, novelist and activist Maya Angelou died this week in her North Carolina home, her agent has revealed. Initial reports suggest she was found dead by a caretaker or carer in the early hours of May 28. She had cancelled a number of recent appointments due to ill-health.
Born Marguerite ‘Rita’ Johnson in St Louis, Missouri, Angelou took her professional name while performing as a dancer/actress, where she specialised in Caribbean themes. She had married a Greek named Angelos and combined her ‘exotic sounding’ nickname, Maya, with a variation of her married surname to come up with something her management regarded as “more distinctive”.
Prior to the identity change, she had spent her early years studying dance and drama in San Francisco, but dropped out at age 14, instead becoming the city’s first African-American female cable car conductor. She later returned to high school to finish her diploma, became pregnant and subsequently gave birth a few weeks after graduation. While the 17-year-old single mother waited tables to support her son, her earlier interest in music and dance became a passion, and she went on to tour Europe in the mid-1950s in the opera production “Porgy and Bess.” In 1957, she recorded her first album, “Calypso Lady.”
In 1958, having ended her marriage some years earlier, Angelou become a part of the Harlem Writers Guild in New York and also played a queen in “The Blacks,” an off-Broadway production by French dramatist Jean Genet.
Affectionately referred to as Dr. Angelou, the professor never went to college. She was, however, awarded more than 30 honorary degrees and taught American studies for years at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem. “I created myself,” she has said. “I have taught myself so much.”
Angelou was born April 4, 1928 and grew up between St. Louis and the then-racially-segregated town of Stamps, Arkansas. She got into writing after a childhood tragedy that stunned her into silence for years. When she was seven, her mother’s boyfriend raped her. He was later beaten to death by a mob after she testified against him. “My seven-and-a-half-year-old logic deduced that my voice had killed him, so I stopped speaking for almost six years,” she said. From the silence, a louder voice was born.
Before making it big, the 6-foot-tall wordsmith also worked as a cook and sang with a travelling road show. “Look where we’ve all come from … coming out of darkness, moving toward the light,” she once said. “It is a long journey, but a sweet one, bittersweet.”
Her list of friends was as impressive as her illustrious career. Talk show queen Oprah Winfrey referred to her as “sister friend.” She counted Martin Luther King Jr., with whom she worked during the Civil Rights movement, among her friends. King was assassinated on her 40th birthday.
Angelou spoke at least six languages, and worked at one time as a newspaper editor in Egypt and Ghana. During that period, she wrote “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” launching the first in a series of autobiographical books. “I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine … before she realizes she’s reading,” she once said.
Angelou was also one of the first black women film directors. Her work on Broadway has been nominated for Tony Awards. She was awarded America’s highest civilian honour, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, by President Barack Obama in 2011. She leaves one son, Clyde ‘Guy’ Johnson.
