Maya Angelou Read Free Page B

birth to a son.
Gather Together in My Name (1944–1949)
    The second volume, Gather Together in My Name (1974), begins in the mid-1940s, near the end of World War II, with its negative effects on black lives. It concludes several years later, after Angelou has won her own personal war against drugs, prostitution, and dependency. Angelou’s negative traits in this volume are intensified by a visit to Stamps, where she and Momma (Annie) Henderson confronted their differing attitudes toward race. These attitudes proved to be irreconcilable.
    Much of Gather Together treats the issue of mothering. When Angelou became a mother, she was still a child, understandably lacking in wisdom and sophistication, without job training or advanced schooling of any sort. Nevertheless, she was able to survive through trial and error, while defining herself in terms of being a black woman.
    Gather Together charts her various work experiences as she moved from job to job, trying to provide for her son and survive in a hostile economic situation. She was a Creole cook, a dancer, a dishwasher, and a barmaid. Frequently these jobs were entangled with her feelings for men who tried to take advantage of her naïveté.
    Angelou’s confession that she had been a prostitute, that she had hidden stolen goods, and that she had almost lost her son was difficult to put into words. On the brighter side, however, in the confusion and turmoil that surrounded her, Maya had been learning how to perform professionally for live audiences. Her nightclub performances with R. L. Poole proved her to be a natural dancer; in 1952, at the age of twenty-four, she reportedly won a scholarship to study under Pearl Primus, the Trinidadian choreographer whose 1943 dance creation, “Strange Fruit,” was internationally acclaimed. In one of her musings she tells about her dancing partnership with Alvin Ailey (1933–1989), the African American performer and choreographer. Ailey brilliantly combined elements of modern dance, ballet, and West African tribal dancing. Angelou and Ailey dressed in skimpy homemade costumes and hired themselves out to the Elks and the Masons as the team of Al and Rita ( Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now 1993, 95–98). She provides no time frame for their collaboration.
    As Angelou became more in demand for her singing and dancing talents, she became more emotionally distraught in knowing that her career was in conflict with her desire to be an excellent mother. This situation, very familiar to mothers with careers, becomes the major theme of her third volume.
Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas (1949–1957)
    Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas , published in 1976, covers an unhappy stage in Maya’s development. Her dancing career improved, but with it came the anguish and isolation that resulted from being away from her son. She was also separated forever from Momma Henderson, whose death is movingly commemorated in Singin’ and Swingin’ .
    Maya, now Mrs. Tosh Angelos, was married and divorced in one short, unhappy interval. Again on her own, she committed herself to the European and African tour of Porgy and Bess , which lasted almost two years, from 1954 to 1955. She was twenty-eight years old, with a young son whom she had left with her mother, Vivian Baxter, repeating the history of her own early childhood, when she and Bailey were sent off to Momma Henderson.
    Although sending one’s child to stay with his or her grandmother is not an uncommon solution for career women with children, the decision had unpleasant effects for Maya and Guy. According to Dolly McPherson, Angelou’s guilt and her intense love for Guy “overshadow her other experiences” in this troubling third volume (89). At the end, in an attempt to reconcile with her unhappy son, Angelou took him with her for an engagement in Hawaii, pledging to be